REALISM  IN  THE  NEW  IRISH  DRAMA 


BY 

AVIS  DUNGAN  CARLSON 

A.  B.  Southwestern  College,  1917 


THESIS 

SUBMITTED  IN  PARTIAL  FULFILLMENT  OF  THE  REQUIREMENTS 
FOR  THE  DEGREE  OF  MASTER  OF  ARTS  IN  ENGLISH 
IN  THE  GRADUATE  SCHOOL  OF  THE 
UNIVERSITY  OF  ILLINOIS, 

1922 


URBANA,  ILLINOIS 


r 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2015 


https://archive.org/details/realisminnewirisOOcarl 


UNIVERSITY  OF  ILLINOIS 


THE  GRADUATE  SCHOOL 


foy...3£ 


-192&— 


I HEREBY  RECOMMEND  THAT  THE  THESIS  PREPARED  UNDER  MY 

supervision  by Avia  Sungari  Carlson 

ENTITLED Re alisn.  in.  lYhe  Hew  Irish  Drama 


BE  ACCEPTED  AS  FULFILLING  THIS  PART  OF  THE  REQUIREMENTS  FOR 


THE  DEGREE  OF. 


IN  st er  of  Arts 


|v  J T1*-  • L 


5 


In  Charge  of  Thesis 


Head  of  Department 


Recommendation  concurred  in* 


Committee 

on 

Final  Examination* 


•Required  for  doctor’s  degree  but  not  for  master’s 


■■  . 


' 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS. 

Chapter  Page 

I.  The  Decline  of  Irish  Nationalist 

Drama 1 

II.  The  Relation  of  the  New  Irish  Drama 

to  Modern  Dramatic  Practice  ....  20 

III.  The  New  Peasant  Genre 46 

IV.  The  Fallacy  of  Regional  Realism....  72 

V .  Lennox  Robinson  and  St . John  Ervine  96 

VI.  Conclusion 130 

Bibliography . 


1 


’ 


CHAPTER  I. 


THE  DECLINE  OF  IRISH  NATIONALIST  DRAMA 

In  any  attempt  to  survey  modern  Irish  drama  the 
first  name  to  be  considered  is  that  of  the  writer  who  is  most 
deoply  related  to  and  indeed  responsible  for  the  sudden  dramatic 
up-bursting  which  began  obscurely  enough  in  the  opening  of  the 
Irish  Literary  Theatre  in  1899,  but  for  the  next  fifteen  years 
was  probably  the  phenomenon  most  talked  of  in  the  world  of 
letters.  For  all  time  the  name  of  W.  B.  Yeats  is  associated 
with  Irish  drama  of  the  last  twenty -five  years;  his  brain  con- 
ceived both  the  artistic  creed  which  underlies  the  national 
school  of  drama  and  the  practical  means  of  carrying  it  out; 
his  enthusiasm  and  faith  kindled  the  enthusiasm  of  those  he 
found  to  help  him  until  the  work  of  the  group  took  on  the  char- 
acter of  a "movement”;  even  the  younger  playwrights  with  whom 
this  study  is  primarily  concerned,  although  not  in  a large 
sense  disciples  of  Yeats,  owe  their  dramatic  impetus  to  him 
and  to  the  national  drama  which  he  fostered.  Without  the 
standards  of  the  Abbey  theatre  and  the  atmosphere  of  dramatic 
activity  which  pervaded  Ireland  in,  say,  1906  the  young  writers, 
Ervine,  Mayne,  Robinson,  Murray,  Colum  and  Boyle,  would  hardly 
have  set  themselves  at  the  most  difficult  of  literary  forms. 


' 


. 

, 


-2- 


It  is  necessary,  then,  in  studying  the  new  Irish 
drama  to  begin  with  a brief  account  of  the  National  drama,  its 
rise,  principal  figures,  and  artistic  principles,  but  chiefly 
the  underlying  causes  of  its  decline — causes  which  might  ex- 
plain its  rejection  by  the  young  men  who  were  just  beginning 
to  learn  their  art  when  the  national  drama  was  at  its  height. 

George  Moore  has  said,  "All  the  Irish  movement  rose 
out  of  Yeats  and  returns  to  Yeats."1  The  irritating  obscurity 
of  the  last  half  of  the  statement  does  not  prevent  assent  to 
the  first  half,  for  the  fact  remains  that  had  not  Yeats  played 
the  beneficent  tyrant  of  art  as  he  sees  art,  there  would  have 
been  no  great  school  of  modern  Irish  drama.  He  gave  it  its 
impress,  defined  its  bounds,  reformed  its  theatre  and  in  a 
large  measure  invented  its  famous  technique  of  acting,  inter- 
ested in  it  the  two  writers  who  besides  himself  make  up  the 
school,  and  fought  its  battles  as  a propagandist.  To  realize 
how  thoroughly  it  springs  from  the  artistic  ideals  of  Yeats 
one  has  to  go  back  to  the  very  beginnings  of  the  movement  . 

When  in  1899  he  with  Lady  Gregory,  Edward  Martyn 
and  George  Moore  founded  the  tiny  Irish  Literary  Theatre,  time 
was  not  long  in  showing  his  differences  from  two  of  his  co- 
workers in  opinion  as  to  what  the  new  theatre  was  to  be  and  do. 
Moore  and  Martyn  had  learned  in  London  and  on  the  continent 


1 . Salve,  p . 206 . 


, 


-3- 


a taste  for  Ib3en  and  the  "drama  of  ideas".  Martyn,  especially, 
stood  for  a theatre  like  The  Independent  Theatre  which  should 
develop  a drama  only  different  from  the  continental  and  English 
drama  tracing  its  ancestry  to  Ibsen,  as  it  would  differ  spring- 
ing from  "an  idealism  founded  upon  the  ancient  genius  of  the 
land."^  He  himself  was  more  familiar  with  and  therefore  more 
interested  in  landlord  and  middle  classes  than  in  the  peasants 
in  whose  life  and  speech  Yeats  was  discovering  a source  for 
Irish  art.  For  these  reasons  Martyn  argued  in  the  United 
Irishman  that  Irish  actors  should  be  trained  to  present  the 
drama  of  society.  His  own  plays  show  the  Norwegian  influence, 
although  E.  A.  Boyd  in  Contemporary  Drama  of  Ireland  insists 
that  it  was  an  Ibsenism  more  colored  by  the  personality  of 
Martyn  than  was  Shaw’s.  "Instead  of  merely  seizing  upon  the 
facilities  for  propaganda  afforded  by  the  worn-out  conventions, 
he  applied  Ibsen’s  method  to  the  portrayal  of  national  char- 
acter and  interpretation  of  Irish  life."^ 

Yeats,  however,  as  every  student  of  modern  drama 
knows,  conceived  of  the  function  and  materials  of  the  new 
drama  very  differently.  "Our  movement  is  a return  to  the 
people,  and  the  drama  of  society  would  but  magnify  a condition 
of  life  which  the  countryman  and  the  artisan  could  but  copy 

1 . Beltaine.  February  1900  . 

2 . Contemporary  Drama  of  Ireland,  p . 18  . 


. 


. 


-4- 


to  their  hurt.  The  play  that  is  to  give  them  a quite  natural 
pleasure  should  either  tell  them  of  their  own  life,  or  of  that 
life  where  every  man  can  see  his  own  image,  because  there 
alone  does  human  nature  escape  from  arbitrary  conditions — 

If  we  busy  ourselves  with  poetry  and  the  countryman,  two  things 
which  have  ever  mixed  with  one  another  in  life  as  on  the  stage, 
we  may  recover  in  the  course  of  years  a lost  art.M^  This 
insistence  that  in  the  life  of  the  peasant  and  his  folk  lore 
is  to  be  found  poetry  is  the  great  distinguishing  mark  of  the 
national  school  of  drama  which  Yeats  founded.  At  the  end  of 
the  three  tentative  years  planned  for  the  Irish  Literary  Theatre 
Martyn  dropped  out  of  the  movement  as  Moore  had  already  done. 
Yeats's  influence  was  now  dominant. 

Nevertheless,  the  tendency  of  the  new  school  was  al- 
most at  once  to  move  away  from  the  poetic  drama  in  which  Yeats 
was  primarily  interested  and  to  stress  more  and  more  the  pea- 
sant . The  reason  for  this  change  is  not  far  to  seek:  Yeats 

is  essentially  a poet,  not  a dramatist,  whereas  Synge  is  es- 
sentially a dramatist  with  a high  degree  of  lyric  impulse . 

The  heart  of  Yeats's  artistic  creed  is  in  his  statement: 

"All  the  great  masters  have  understood  that  there  cannot  be 
great  art  without  the  little  limited  art  of  the  fable— and 
the  rich,  far-wandering,  many-imaged  life  of  the  half -seen 


1.  Sam ha in,  1903;  Collected  Works  of  Yeats,  Vol . IV.,  p.  103. 


• 

-5- 


world  beyond  it."'*'  The  same  idea  is  in  the  words  of  Forgael: 

"All  would  be  well 

Could  we  but  give  us  wholly  to  the  dream 
And  get  into  their  world  that  to  the  sense 
Is  shadow,  and  not  linger  wretchedly 
Among  substantial  things;  for  it  is  dreams 
That  lead  us  to  the  flowing,  changing  world 
That  the  heart  longs  for. ”2 

Such  a temperament  could  hardly  have  any  close  con- 
tact with  or  sympathy  for  human  life  in  the  rough,  the  one 
thing  which  good  drama  must  have.  The  result  is,  says  Forrest 
Reid,  Mwe  hardly  ever  get  from  Mr.  Yeats'  plays  a pleasure 
that  comes  through  our  emotional  sympathy.  We  never  really 
care  enough  about  Naisi  and  Deirdre  to  care  what  becomes  of 
them.  We  are  moved  by  the  beauty  of  the  imagery,  the  beauty 
of  the  verse,  but  that  emotion  of  pity  which  such  a story  as 
theirs  should  arouse  is  left  untouched."  In  the  same  way 
Weygandt  characterizes  the  dramas  of  Yeats  as  "a  development 
of  epic  and  lyric  poetry  illustrated  by  tableaux  against  back- 

, 4 

ground  out  of  faery."  Such  a form  of  literature  going  back 
in  its  sources  to  old  legends,  folk -tales,  books  of  mysticism 


1 • Ideas  of  Good  and  Evil,  p . 341 . 

3 . Shadowy  Waters . 

3.  Forrest  Reid:  W.  B.  Yeats,  p.  180. 

4.  Weygandt:  Irish  Plavs  and  Playwrights,  p . 45 . 


. 


• 

-6- 


and  magic,  faery -like  landscape,  the  poems  of  Spenser,  Blake, 
Shelley  and  William  Morris,  and  to  the  old  English  morality, 
the  effects  of  Greek  tragedy  and  Maeterlinck's  static  drama, 
could  never  result  in  a close  feeling  for  human  life  of  to-day, 
even  in  a country  as  close  to  primitive  races  as  Ireland  is. 
Yeats  himself  admitted  in  one  of  the  earlier  issues  of  Samhain 
the  possibility  that  "we  may  have  to  deal  with  passing  issues 
until  we  have  re-created  the  imaginative  tradition  of  Ireland 
and  filled  the  popular  imagination  again  with  saints  and  he- 
roes." If  he,  who  of  the  early  group  of  Irish  writers  was 
the  one  most  thoroughly  imbued  with  the  artistic  principle  of 
art  for  truth  and  beauty's  sake;  who  unfalteringly  fought  to 
keep  his  drama  entirely  apart  from  service  to  any  cause;  who 
rejected  entirely  the  drama  of  ideas  as  pallid  and  unfitted 
for  the  theatre  which  should  be  a place  for  intellectual  ex- 
citement— if  he  could  admit  the  possibility  of  "having  to  deal 
with  passing  issues"  even  temporarily,  it  is  no  wonder  that 
friends,  even  those  most  immediate,  developed  away  from  his 
artistic  theories.  What  happened  to  Yeats  himself  as  he 
carried  them  to  their  logical  development  will  be  shown  later. 

Of  his  literary  associates  in  the  movement,  Lady 
Gregory  is  easily  the  closest,  the  one  with  whom  there  was 
most  of  mutual  influence.  Their  common  interest  in  old  folk 


1.  Yeats:  .Collected  Works.  Vol . IV.,  p.  87. 


-7- 


lore  was  fully  as  strong  in  her  as  in  Yeats.  Weygandt  con- 
siders that  with  her  remarkable  versions  of  the  old  stories  in 
Gods  and  Fighting  Men  and  Cuchulain  of  Muirthemne  she  has  done 
more  than  any  other  writer  of  the  Gaelic  countries  to  bring 
home  to  us  the  wonders  of  Gaelic  romance.^  If  Yeats  inter- 
ested her  in  the  drama  as  the  great  art  form  for  Ireland,  she 
in  turn  taught  him  to  use  the  language  of  the  Irish  folk,  to 
reveal  as  he  says  "the  true  countenance  of  the  folk".  What- 
ever she  may  have  learned  of  idiomatic  method  from  Douglas  Hyde 
in  the  course  of  their  numerous  collaborations  and  in  her 
translations  of  his  Gaelic,  it  is  certain  that  she  greatly 
enriched  and  broadened  Hyde's  idiom  from  her  own  observations 
of  the  peasants  of  Xiltartan  in  Galway . She  was  heart  and 
life  a part  of  the  movement  which  Yeats  sponsored;  she  backed 
it  with  money,  with  the  drudgery  of  managing  its  least  artistic 
phases;  she  wrote  plays  to  its  order  when  it  needed  comedy; 
she  lectured  for  it,  lived  for  it. 

How  closely  do  the  plays  of  Lady  Gregory,  who,  because 
she  was  most  intimately  associated  with  Yeats,  might  be  expected 
to  carry  out  his  theories  most  exactly,  illustrate  his  artistic 
canon  of  "the  rich,  far -wandering,  many-imaged  life  of  the 
half -seen  world,"  a canon  which  leaves  no  place  for  realism  of 
any  sort? 


1.  Irish  Plays  and  Playwrights,  p.  138. 


. 


-8- 


It  is  true,  of  course,  that  the  little  farces  of 
peasant  life  which  have  been  so  immensely  popular  were  written 
because  the  new  theatre  needed  such  plays,  but  it  is  also  true 
that  they,  not  the  folk-history  plays,  are  the  individual, 
living  part  of  her  dramatic  output . She  is  remembered  for 
her  Workhouse  Ward  and  Spreading  the  News  rather  than  for 
Dervorgilla  or  Kincora . Hyacinth  Halvey  or  even  the  butcher 
is  far  more  of  a human  reality  than  Diarmuid,  Flann  or  Brian. 
Even  Grania,  agreed  upon  by  all  critics  as  the  best  of  the  six 
folk -history  plays,  is  not  a great  play.  According  to  Boyd 
it  "rises  above  the  fairly  commonplace  level  of  its  companion 
plays  precisely  in  proportion  as  it  emulates  the  manner  of 
Synge.  His  rhythms  are  in  such  speeches  as:  'But  you  and  I 
have  changed  the  world  entirely,  and  put  a curb  upon  the  spring- 
time, and  bound  the  seven  elements  with  our  strength.' After 
quoting  a number  of  such  passages,  he  adds,  "Yet  one  cannot 
compare  the  eloquent  beauty  of  Synge's  poetic  idiom  with  these 
somewhat  forced  effects,  without  feeling  that  the  latter  are 
echoes  rather  than  the  expression  of  an  original  sense  of  verbal 
music."  Lady  Gregory's  own  feeling  as  to  the  comparative  worth 
of  these  plays  going  back  to  legendary  old  kings  and  old  heroes 
which  were  to  Yeats  the  source  of  true  national  drama,  is  shown 
in  her  apologetic,  "Perhaps  I ought  to  have  written  nothing 


1.  E.  A.  Boyd:  Contemporary  Drama  of  Ireland,  p.  133. 


...  , sa 


but  these  short  comedies,  but  desire  for  experiment  is  like 
fire  in  the  blood.” 

If  then,  these  plays  which  most  nearly  approximate 
Yeats's  views  of  true  Irish  drama  in  source,  material,  and 
spirit,  are  not  the  characteristic  and  valuable  part  of  Lady 
Gregory's  plays,  the  question  arises:  in  what  relation  do 
the  peasant  farces  stand  to  those  theories? 

That  they  have  struck  a sympathetic  chord  in  the 
Irish  thought  and  feeling  their  popularity  will  attest.  They 
are  performed  at  the  Abbey  theatre  two  or  three  times  as  often 
as  are  the  plays  of  any  other  playwright . In  1912  there  were 
sixteen  performances  of  The  Rising  of  the  Moon  as  against  three 
of  The  Playboy  of  the  Western  World,  while  The  Workhouse  Ward 
was  performed  more  than  twice  as  many  times  as  Colum's  study 
of  a workhouse,  Thomas  Muskerrv . In  neither  instance  was 
Lady  Gregory's  play  comparable  in  real  artistic  breadth  and 
depth  to  the  play  which  found  so  much  less  favor  among  Irish 
people . Argument  from  popularity  is  always  dangerous  evi- 
dence, but  does  not  this  long  continued  popular  favor  indicate 
that  Ireland  thinks  it  sees  itself  portrayed  in  these  plays; 
portrayed  as  it  likes  to  think  it  is?  The  poetical  plays  of 
Yeats  which  openly  professed  to  deal  with  far-away  things  never 
attained  anything  like  the  popularity  of  these  comedies  purport- 
ing to  show  the  present-day  peasant  as  he  is. 

In  order  to  realize  how  far  Lady  Gregory  does  get 


■ 

, 


B , 


-10- 


away  from  the  poetical  drama  in  which  Yeats  was  primarily 
interested,  one  has  only  to  remember  two  parallel  passages 
from  the  two  authors.  In  describing  the  contentions  of  Ireland 
Yeats  makes  Cuchulain  say:  "Townland  against  townland,  barony 
against  barony,  kingdom  against  kingdom,  province  against 
province,  and  if  there  be  but  two  door-posts  to  a door  the  one 
fighting  against  the  other. In  The  Workhouse  Ward  when  Mike 
Mclnerney  in  response  to  his  fellow's  doleful,  "To  be  lying 
here  and  no  conversible  person  near  me  would  be  the  abomination 
of  misery!"  begs  his  sister  to  take  Michael  Miskell  also,  she 
replies,  "Yourself  and  Mike  that  never  left  fighting  and  scold- 
ing and  attacking  one  another!  Sparring  at  one  another  like 
two  young  pups  you  were,  and  threatening  one  another  after  like 
two  grown  dogs!"  Cuchulain's  speech  is  poetry;  the  peasants' 
an  idiomatic  version  of  "It  is  better  to  be  fighting  than  to 
be  lonesome."  Cuchulain  is  a creature  of  fancy,  as  far  re- 
moved from  a half -savage  chieftain  as  can  well  be  imagined. 

The  two  old  paupers  are  another  sort  of  being— they  are  Galway 
peasants  of  to-day  touched  with  a rather  tolerant  imagination. 
One  feels  in  all  the  farce-comedies,  that  is,  in  all  the  really 
characteristic  work  of  Lady  Gregory,  this  branching  away  from 
Yeats,  this  half -approach  to  "the  machine  shop  of  the  realists." 

And  yet  Lady  Gregory  is  not  a realist  in  any  strict 


1.  Golden  Helmet,  in  Collected  Works.  Vol . V.,  p.  75. 


. 


. 

' 


-11- 


sense  of  the  word  and  is  certainly  never  a descendant  of  Ibsen 
in  having  a reformer's  motive  back  of  her  work.  She  would 
protest  as  emphatically  as  Yeats  against  the  opponents  of  the 
new  school  "who  are  ever  begging  us  to  attack  the  priests  or 
the  English,  or  wanting  us  to  put  our  imaginations  into  hand- 
cuffs so  that  we  may  be  sure  of  never  seeming  to  do  one  or 
the  other."'*’  Neither  has  she  any  intentions  of  reforming 
her  peasant  or  of  arousing  sympathy  for  him,  motives  which 
animated  many  of  the  writers  of  continental  peasant  drama. 

The  picture  she  presents  of  him  is  never  drawn  in  harsh  lines. 
He  is  an  absurd  creature  who  regulates  his  life  by  superstition 
and  wise  old  sawsj  who  has  a picturesque  and  homely  speech 
which  illustrates  Yeats 's  contention  that  beautiful  language 
nowadays  exists  only  in  the  speech  of  the  poet  and  of  the  very 
poor.  His  very  inconsistencies  and  illogicalities  make  him 
a being  without  the  pale  of  ordinary  moral  standards.  His 
relation  to  his  creator  is  something  like  that  of  a child  to 
a grown-up  who  feels  none  of  the  responsibility  of  near  kin 
and  therefore  is  free  to  enjoy  his  whimsicalities  and  laugh 
at  his  incongruities. 

This  kindly  treatment  of  the  peasant  as  compared  with  the 
treatment  given  him  in  the  plays  of  the  later  Irish  writers  is 
probably  to  be  explained  in  Lady  Gregory's  consciousness  of 


1.  Samhain,  1905,  in  Collected  Works.  Vol . IV.,  p.  204. 


. 


- 


-12- 


superior  position  and  intellect.  She  presents  only  a super- 
ficial view  of  the  peasant  because  from  her  detached  position 
she  sees  only  his  delightful  picturesqueness  and  fails  entirely 
to  see  the  sordidness  and  harshness  which  lurk  under  his  genial 
exterior.  These  qualities  Lennox  Robinson,  Padraic  Colum, 

St.  John  Ervine  and  the  others  of  the  younger  group,  because 
they  are  of  the  people,  see  and  wish  to  remove.  And  in  pro- 
portion as  Lady  Gregory  fails  to  give  us  "a  whole  man”  she 
is  producing  pleasing  caricature,  not  character,  and  subordinat- 
ing real  drama  to  an  interest  in  idiom. 

In  one  other  respect  Lady  Gregory  fails  to  produce 
reality:  in  the  restriction  of  motives  almost  solely  to  fear 
of  a neighbor’s  opinion.  Love,  hatred,  altruism,  patriotism 
(except  in  The  Rising  of  the  Moon) — most  of  the  great  emotions 
which  dominate  life  hardly  enter  into  these  peasant  plays  at 
all.  Herein,  probably,  is  the  cause  of  the  absence  of  conflict 
and  passion . 

In  the  light  of  these  facts  Lady  Gregory’s  position 
in  the  general  field  of  Irish  drama  can  be  seen.  She  is  one 
link  by  which  the  National  drama  outlined  by  Yeats  gradually 
became  limited  almost  exclusively  to  the  portrayal  of  the 
peasant.  She  gets  away  from  the  poetic  drama  and  by  the  pop- 
ularity which  her  peasant  plays  gained  gives  impetus  to  the 
young  men  just  beginning  to  write,  directing  their  attention 
to  the  really  great  fact  of  Irish  life,  providing  them  with 
precedent.  But  she  is  only  semi-realistic — her  peasant  is 


' 

> ; 


# 


■ 


: 


-13- 


not  the  true  worker  of  the  land. 

The  works  of  J.  M.  Synge  have  been  subjected  to  such 
extensive  and  intensive  criticism  that  his  position  in  the 
National  school  is  well  known.  His  prefaces  are  expansions 
of  Yeats's  pleas  for  imaginative  drama,  for  an  "art  of  the  the- 
atre that  shall  be  joyful,  fantastic,  extravagant,  whimsical, 
beautiful,  resonant,  and  altogether  reckless."1 2  Synge  ex- 
presses the  same  idea  in  his  famous  words,  "On  the  stage  one 
must  have  reality  and  one  must  have  joy;  and  that  is  why  the 
intellectual  modern  drama  has  failed,  and  people  have  grown 
sick  of  the  false  joy  of  the  musical  comedy  that  has  been 
given  them  in  place  of  the  rich  joy  found  only  in  what  is 
superb  and  wild  in  reality."^  If  their  theories  of  art  are 
alike,  Synge  is  far  more  able  than  Yeats  to  practice  them 
without  losing  dramatic  excellence.  Yeats's  feeling  that 
beautiful  language  is  to  be  found  among  the  peasants  reaches 
its  flower  not  in  his  own  plays  but  in  the  "romancin'"  of 
Christy  Mahon,  the  rich  rhythm  of  which  makes  it  rank  among 
the  most  beautiful  passages  of  English  prose.  "Let  you  wait 
to  hear  me  talking,  till  we're  astray  in  Erris,  when  Good 
Friday's  by,  drinking  a sup  from  a well,  and  making  mighty 
kisses  with  our  wetted  mouths,  or  gaming  in  a gap  or  sunshine. 


1.  Samhain,  1904,  in  Collected  Works.  Vol . IV.,  p.  173. 

2.  Preface  to  The  Plavbov  of  the  Western  World.  1907. 


. 

' 


■ 


. 


-14- 


with  yourself  stretched  back  into  your  necklace  in  the  flowers 
of  the  eaTth." 

In  material  as  well  as  in  ideas  of  art  and  dialogue 
Synge  agreed  with  Yeats  . All  of  his  plays  except  one  deal 
with  folk  imagination  as  it  has  been  developed  through  the 
long  years  of  life  along  the  west  coast;  that  one  exception 
is  of  an  ancient  legend  which  Yeats  himself  used,  the  story  of 
Deirdre.  And  yet  the  difference  between  the  two  dramatists 
can  be  no  better  illustrated  than  by  comparing  their  versions 
of  the  story.  Yeats's  Deirdre  is  a beautiful  poem,  sad  in 
spirit.  Synge's  Deirdre.  unfinished  as  it  is,  is  a poetic 
tragedy  of  a high  degree  of  power.  One  lacks  reality;  the 
other  is  informed  with  it.  Why  the  difference?  Chiefly  this 
Yeats  is  naturally  a poet,  Synge  a born  dramatist.  He  has 
breathed  his  own  spirit  into  the  old  tale,  and  while  using  none 
of  the  methods  of  realism  has  achieved  reality.  Character 
and  incident  were  to  Synge  no  more  than  a means  for  the  expres- 
sion of  his  own  vision  of  the  glory  of  life  and  the  splendour 
of  its  sadness. 

Placed  beside  Lady  Gregory's  peasants,  those  of  Synge 
show  the  same  contrast  of  life  and  dimensions  and  passion  which 
his  Deirdre  does  in  comparison  with  the  Deirdre  of  Yeats  . 

There  is,  to  be  sure,  the  same  characteristic  of  un-morality. 


1.  Chas  . Tennyson:  Irish  Plays  and  Playwrights:  Quarterly 
Review  210,  p.  230. 


, 


-15- 


lack  of  what  we  are  accustomed  to  think  of  as  idealism;  and 
the  idiom  is  basically  the  same.  Yet  Maurya  is  a far  more 
tragic  figure  than  Mary  Cahel  in  The  Gaol  Gate.  Christy  Mahon 
moves  and  pulsates  with  life  as  Hyacinth  Halvey  never  does, 
although  both  are  comic  characters  purporting  to  portray  an 
actual  individual.  The  great  difference  arises  from  Synge's 
patient  selection  and  blending  of  characteristics  into  one 
rich  whole.  Lady  Gregory's  plays  are  like  gossip  poured  forth 
in  a broad  stream  rambling  in  every  unimpeded  direction. 

Synge's  are  carefully  and  strictly  guided.  Although  he  got 
the  initial  idea  for  his  characters  from  living  peasants  in 
whom  he  saw  a mixture  of  the  god  and  the  beast,  his  finished 
products  are  never  typical  peasants.  He  wrote  of  tinkers  and 
tramps  because  their  life  seemed  richer  in  imaginative  elements 
than  the  life  of  ordinary  people;  but  he  added  to  even  their 
picturesqueness  and  emphasized  even  their  duality.  He  in- 
sisted that  he  used  the  language  of  peasants  just  as  he  heard 
it  spoken  in  the  kitchen  and  fish  markets,  but  to  make  this 
speech  "fully  flavored  as  a nut  or  an  apple"  he  carefully 
pruned  away  its  waste  elements.  In  the  same  way  the  situations 
of  his  plays,  while  originating  in  stories  told  by  the  peasants, 
are  really  selected  and  embellished  by  a discriminating  artist. 

Yet  paradoxically  enough,  Synge  in  spite  of  the  in- 
tense air  of  reality  one  finds  in  his  peasants  is  not  realistic, 
or  at  best  only  semi-realistic  . Thomas  MacDonagh  of  University 


-16- 


College,  Dublin,  contends  that  he  is  "often  merely  'Celtic1 
in  his  phraseology  though  far  more  often  rich  and  right  . His 
fault  in  the  matter  was  that  he  crammed  his  language  too  full 
of  rich  phrases  ..  .neglecting  the  common  stuff  of  speech."1  To 
quote  Charles  Tennyson  again,  "His  plays  are  no  more  repro- 
ductions of  material  life  than  his  language  is  a reproduction 
of  the  beautiful  speech  of  the  West . Its  strange  cadence  and 
burning  phrases  represent  not  what  the  ear  heard,  but  the  music 

o 

which  the  hearing  bred  in  the  mind."  The  sum  of  the  matter 
is  that  by  exaggerating  the  richness  of  his  peasant  life  in 
order  to  make  drama  which  "nourishes  the  imagination"  he  has 
produced  a reality  which  is  far  from  being  the  Irish  peasant 
of  today  . The  facts  that  death  found  him  at  Deirdre  instead 
of  a peasant  play,  and  that  he  told  Yeats  that  he  was  "sick 
of  the  peasant  on  the  stage"  may  be  taken,  perhaps,  as  an  in- 
dication of  his  own  feeling  that  for  his  purpose  the  peasant 
was  not  the  best  material.  That  point  can  never  be  settled; 
but  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  his  drama  of  modern  peasants 
largely  influenced  the  young  realists,  widely  as  they  differed 
from  him  in  artistic  methods  and  in  the  amount  of  genius  they 
brought  to  their  work  . 

Today  this  Nationalist  school  is  history  rather  than 


1.  MacDonagh:  Literature  in  Ireland,  p . 48 . 
2-  Quarterly  Review.  Vol . 210,  p.  230. 


, 


-17- 


a present  literary  force.  The  premature  death  of  Synge  in 
190S  just  when  he  was  beginning  to  turn  toward  folk  history 
may  be  said  to  mark  the  climax  of  the  movement  . Since  then 
there  has  been  almost  nothing  to  break  its  rapid  decline. 

Lady  Gregory’s  New  Comedies,  published  in  1913,  are  decidedly 
inferior  to  the  Seven  Short  Plays  of  1909.  Hyacinth  Halvey 
resurrected  in  the  later  volume  is  no  longer  particularly 
humorous  and  has  the  same  faults  as  in  the  play  of  1909.  Hack- 
neyed farce  elements  continually  appear  throughout  the  plays; 
of  the  group  The  Image  is  the  only  significant  piece  and  even 
it  fails  to  be  entirely  convincing.  According  to  Boyd  this 
inferiority  to  the  early  comedies  results  from  the  original 
verve  and  zest  having  made  way  for  a Mcertain  mechanical  effect 
which  must  be  attributed  to  excessive  exploitation  of  the  same 
material . 1,1 

As  for  Yeats  himself,  his  last  volume  of  plays  Four 
Flay s for  Dane er s published  in  1931  is  so  thoroughly  exotic 
that  in  spite  of  containing  names  as  familiar  as  Cuchulain, 

Emer,  and  Dervorgilla,  they  seem  more  Oriental  than  Irish. 

The  old  Maeterl inckian  theories  which  first  prompted  him  to 
simplify  acting  and  stage  effects  now  lead  to  the  impressionism 
calling  for  marionette-like  acting  and  the  extreme  of  substitut- 
ing for  curtains  a black  cloth  adorned  with  a suggestive  emblem. 


!•  Contemporary  Drama  of  Ireland,  p,  129. 


. 


' 

■ 


• . < 


-18- 


The  cloth  is  to  be  folded  and  unfolded  by  the  musicians  who 
appear  in  each  of  the  plays.  In  a significant  note  on  At 
the  Hawk  * s Well  Yeats  says,  "My  blunder  has  been  that  I did 
not  discover  in  my  youth  that  my  theatre  must  be  the  ancient 
theatre  that  can  be  made  by  unrolling  a carpet  or  marking  out 
a place  with  a stick  or  setting  up  a screen  against  the  wall." 
The  model  for  this  stage  he  finds  in  the  "Noh"  stage  of  Japan. 
Still  another  Oriental  influence  is  to  be  found  in  the  use  cf 
Japanese  dancers  and  in  masks  for  all  the  principal  characters. 
Arabian  mysticism,  of  which  Yeats  has  always  been  a student, 
appears  throughout  these  plays— in  the  dreams  of  Dervorgilla 
and  Dermot,  in  the  use  of  birds  as  symbols  for  subjectivity  in 
Calvary . in  the  discussion  of  the  source  of  woman's  beauty  in 
The  Only  Jealousy  of  Emer . Of  the  plays  Yeats  says,  "In 
writing  these  little  plays  I knew  I was  creating  something 
which  could  only  succeed  in  a civilization  very  unlike  ours." 

When  the  founder  of  Nationalist  drama  has  carried 
his  cult  of  poetry  and  old  legends  so  far  that  his  output  is 
no  longer  more  than  slightly  reflective  of  anything  national 
and  when  his  associates  are  no  longer  writing,  the  school  may 
safely  be  said  to  be  dead  unless  it  is  being  re-inforced  by 
new  writers  . The  playwrights  of  Ireland  today  are  very  far 
from  the  nationalist  tradition,  for  they  are  interested  in 
nothing  but  present  day  workers  of  the  land  or  factory.1  The 


1.  Lord  Dunsany  is  clearly  an  exception  to  this  statement. 


. 


I 1 


-19- 


influence  which  dominated  Martyn  is  apparently  as  strong  upon 
them  as  that  of  Yeats  . They  have  combined  the  elements  which 
to  them  seem  best  in  the  art  theories  of  the  two  founders  of 
the  dramatic  movement.  While  using  the  peasant  which  Martyn 
rejected,  they  have  reverted  to  the  type  of  drama  which  he 
advocated.  The  national  school  of  drama  at  the  distance  of 
but  little  more  than  a decade  from  the  death  of  Synge  seems 
a mushroom  growth  of  exceeding  beauty,  but  short  life  because 
its  roots  failed  to  catch  deeply  into  the  real  life  of  the 
Irish  people . 


But,  although  the  poetic  glamour  of  his  plays  would  seem  to 
place  him  in  the  Yeats  school,  he  is  excluded  from  it  by  the 
fact  that  he  has  never  used  Celtic  myth  and  legend,  preferring 
to  invent  one  of  his  own  which  he  arbitrarily  attaches  to  the 
fabulous  Orient.  Except  for  the  Celtic  quality  of  imagina- 
tion of  Dunsany's  plays,  they  can  hardly  be  said  to  be  Irish 


at  all . 


■ 


' 


-20- 


CHAPTER  II. 

THE  RELATION  OF  THE  NEW  IRISH  DRAMA  TO 
MODERN  DRAMATIC  PRACTICE 

In  summarizing  the  modern  drama  which  began  in  the 
work  of  Ibsen,  Archibald  Henderson  says,  "The  drama  of  to-day, 
through  the  influences  of  modern  science,  of  contemporary 
democracy,  of  shifting  moral  values,  of  the  critical  rather 
than  the  worshipful  attitude  towards  life,  of  an  irresistible 
thrust  towards  increased  naturalism  and  greater  veracity,  has 
become  bourgeois,  dealing  with  the  world  of  every  day;  unheroic, 
suburban,  and  almost  prosaic,  yet  intensely  interesting  by 
reason  of  its  sincerity  and  humanity;  essentially  critical  in 
tone,  proving  all  things,  holding  fast  that  which  is  good.”1 
A little  farther  on  he  adds  as  almost  his  last  sentence  in 
The  Changing  Drama.  "The  drama  of  to-day  embodies  the  social 
fervor  of  the  epoch." 

With  the  few  striking  exceptions  of  Yeats,  Synge, 
Maeterlinck,  and  Rostand,  the  best  modern  playwrights  of  every 
nation  have  adopted  with  individual  or  national  variations  the 
artistic  form  known  as  "the  drama  of  ideas"  which  accepts  a 


1 • Changing  Drama.  Ch . X . 


. 


. 

. 


. 


-21- 


problem  or  a generalization  upon  a familiar  society  as  the 
basis  oi  the  play,  without  allowing  this  underlying  criticism 
to  tyrannize  over  the  characters . This  drama  of  intellectual 
content  differs  from  the  thesis  play  in  assuming  its  truth  or 
criticism  of  life  instead  of  setting  out  to  prove  it. 

It  has  already  been  pointed  out  that  Yeats  and,  under 
his  influence,  the  other  members  of  the  national  school  of  Irish 
drama  rejected  entirely  the  drama  of  ideas  with  its  insistence 
upon  the  realistic  method  and  the  inculcation  of  a truth  which 
the  dramatist  wishes  to  teach.  The  new  writers  in  their  turn 
have  rejected  the  poetic  drama  of  Yeats  and  the  half -realistic 
portrayal  of  the  peasant  of  Lady  Gregory  and  Synge,  for  a con- 
ception of  the  drama  which  in  spirit  and  technique  harks  di- 
rectly back  to  Ibsen.  A comparative  study  of  the  entire  group 
of  plays  shows  convincingly  their  relation  to  modern  dramatic 
art  in  their  unified  realistic  atmosphere,  in  the  type  of 
themes  chosen  and  the  handling  of  them,  and  in  the  artistic 
purpose  of  their  authors  . 

The  dramatist  of  today  may  do  as  he  likes  in  regard 
to  observing  the  pseudo-classical  unities  of  time  and  place, 
but  to  the  unity  of  action  he  adds  another  hardly  less  in- 
violable, that  of  impression.  If  the  play  is  to  be  realistic 
the  atmosphere  must  be  of  real  people  and  real  events;  if  it 
is  tragic  no  speech  can  detract  from  the  totality  of  tragic 
effect;  if  mystical,  no  trace  of  false  spirituality  and  no 


. 


-32- 


note  of  actuality  must  creep  into  it;  if  it  is  comedy  a senae 
of  foreboding  tragedy  must  not  oppress  the  reader.  That  the 
older  Irish  dramatists  did  achieve  a high  degree  of  unity  of 
impression  in  their  imaginative  drama  no  one  who  has  seen 
Riders  to  the  Sea  and  Cathleen  Ni  Houlihan  can  deny . But  the 
atmosphere  of  typical  European  drama  is  very  different  from 
that  of  Synge's  west  coast  plays  and  Yeats's  poems  of  Gaelic 
tradition.  m?hat  dramatic  atmosphere  do  the  young  playwrights 
choose  and  how  successfully  does  each  of  them  build  it  up  into 
one  unified  whole? 

There  is  always  difficulty  in  generalizing  upon  the 
literary  output  of  a group  of  writers  because  there  is  always 
a tendency  in  individuals  to  vary  from  their  norm,  to  give  rein 
to  a human  desire  for  experimentation.  In  the  case  of  this 
later  group  of  writers,  however,  the  general  characteristic  is 
fairly  clear.  All  of  the  plays  with  the  exceptions  of  Ervine's 
Jane  Clegg  and  Colum's  Mogu.  the  Wanderer,  deal  with  Irish 
people  and  Irish  themes;  all  of  the  plays  except  Campbell's 
Little  Cowherd  of  Slainge  and  Purcell's  The  Pagan  and  the  dram- 
atic dialogues  of  Padraic  Pearse  and  Daniel  Corkery  deal  with 
Irish  themes  through  the  medium  of  present  day  Irish  people; 
in  only  one  play,  Boyle's  Mineral  Workers,  is  nobility  intro- 
duced and  then  only  as  minor  characters;  in  all  but  a very  few 
plays,  notably  Robinson's  The  Patriots  and  The  White-headed  Bov. 
Ervine's  Mixed  Marriage  and  Colum's  Thomas  Musk errv . the  char— 


* 


-23- 


act  ers  are  peasants,  drawn  with  careful  attention  to  the 
realistic  method.  The  plays  last  mentioned  deal,  respectively, 
with  small  trades-people,  day -laborers,  and  petty  officials. 
Considering  how  largely  agricultural  Ireland  is,  this  preponder- 
ance of  peasant  plays  seems  properly  expressive  of  the  national 
life,  while  at  the  same  time  the  few  plays  of  middle-class 
townspeople  are  necessary  to  complete  the  picture  of  Irish  life. 
Evidently,  then,  these  later  playwrights  have  attempted  the 
drama  of  actuality — to  show  Irish  life  as  it  seems  to  them 
actually  to  be. 

Tested  in  the  light  of  this  dramatic  purpose,  the 
plays  of  the  group  do,  on  the  whole,  show  as  intense  unity 
of  impression  as  the  plays  of  Yeats  and  Synge,  even  though  the 
atmosphere  is  totally  different . There  are  several  contribut- 
ing causes.  For  one  thing,  every  one  of  these  authors  has 
studied  to  good  advantage,  the  one-act  play,  which  like  the 
short-story  dares  admit  no  material  which  is  not  necessary 
for  building  up  a pre-conceived  effect.  There  are  few  greater 
one-act  plays  than  Mayne's  The  Troth.  Robinson's  The  Clancv 
Name . and  Ervine's  The  Magnanimous  Lover,  to  mention  the  most 
important  of  the  group.  Even  the  plays  designed  to  fill  a 
whole  evening  are  shorter  and  far  simpler  in  construction  than 
the  average  play,  or  than  The  Playboy  of  the  Western  World. 
Having  limited  themselves  to  a narrow  canvas  and  few  colors, 
the  Irish  realists  have  no  great  temptation  to  mar  their  work 


* 


. 


-34- 


by  diversifying  the  impression. 

From  Ibsen  and  his  followers,  they  have  learned  the 
value  of  preserving  the  unities  of  time  and  place  where  pos- 
sible, not  because  of  the  "verisimilitude”  early  critics  had 
insisted  upon,  but  because  of  the  heightened  effect  lent  by 
unified  place  and  time.  In  this  entire  group  of  plays,  number- 
ing almost  thirty,  there  are  only  two,  Boyle's  Mineral  Workers 
and  Robinson's  The  Cross-Roads,  in  which  the  unity  of  place  is 
not  strictly  observed.  It  is  remarkable  also  that  these  two 
plays  which  are  the  only  plays  covering  any  great  extent  of 
time,  are  the  two  plays  most  faulty  from  the  standpoint  of 
dramatic  effect.  By  contrasting  the  effect  of  Boyle's  comedy 
with  The  White-headed  Bov  where  the  unity  of  time  is  preserved, 
and  The  Cross-Roads  with  Murray's  tragedy  The  Birthright,  one 
realizes  the  dramatic  value  of  the  much  debated  unity  of  time 
as  an  aid  in  building  up  an  over-powering  single  effect . 

That  the  Irish  realists  were  thoroughly  aware  of  the 
value  of  this  compression  of  time  is  shown  by  the  fact  that 
with  the  exception  of  the  two  plays  just  mentioned,  the  action 
is  always  limited  to  a few  weeks,  usually  not  more  than  two. 
Their  compression,  however,  is  not  the  artificial  thing  achieved 
by  the  French  classicists  who  insisted  on  the  unity  of  time  as 
a dogma,  but  that  of  Ibsen  who  by  "an  expanded  fifth  act"  opened 
his  plays  relatively  near  the  climax,  skillfully  sketching  in 
the  antecedent  action  as  the  narrative  proceeds  . Nearly  every 


. 

' 


. 


. 


-25- 


one  of  the  Irish  realists  uses  this  technical  device  over  and 
over  again.  In  the  popular  Whit e-headed  Bov  all  the  history 
of  the  Geoghegan  family  denials  and  sacrifices  for  Denis,  the 
smart  one  of  them,  is  related  hint  by  hint,  and  bit  by  bit 
throughout  the  comedy,  so  that  the  unity  of  time  is  not  arti- 
ficial. Similarly  in  The  Birthright  a really  great  tragic 
effect  is  largely  attained  by  the  skillful  way  in  which  the 
years  of  slowly  growing  friction  in  the  Morrissey  home  are  ex- 
plained during  the  course  of  the  dialogue.  Back  of  the  action 
of  The  Land  are  the  years  when  Murtagh  Cosgar's  family  has  felt 
his  iron  hand;  back  of  The  Harvest  is  a long  story  of  mis-edu- 
cation;  John  Ferguson  and  The  Building  Fund  contain  a great 
deal  of  delayed  exposition;  The  Fiddler's  House  depends  largely 
for  totality  of  effect  upon  this  compression  of  Conn  Hourican's 
past  life  into  the  space  of  two  weeks.  As  a matter  of  fact 
the  synthetic  method  is  used  in  no  plays  except  The  Cross-Roads 
and  The  Mineral  Workers,  already  noted  as  comparatively  rare 
instances  where  the  general  effect  is  not  unified. 

From  this  examination  it  is  apparent  that  when  these 
recent  Irish  plays  fail  in  artistic  effect,  it  is  not  primarily 
from  lack  of  knowledge  on  the  part  of  their  authors  of  the 
rules  of  dramatic  art . Usually  the  failures  may  be  traced  to 
the  common  fault  of  writers  of  less  than  the  first  rank,  an 
over-stressing  of  legitimate  devices.  It  was  in  striving  for 
this  unity  which  they  know  how  to  produce  if  one  is  to  judge 


. . 

. 


. 


-26- 

by  The  Building  Fund  and  The  Patriots,  that  Boyle  and  Robinson 
piled  up  details  until  the  comedies  of  the  former  become  farces 
and  the  tragic  The  Cross-Roads  of  the  other  is  little  more  than 
a melodrama  of  decidedly  lurid  cast.  It  is  this  amateurish 
uncertainty  in  handling  their  material  which  is  the  cause  of 
the  few  discordant  notes  which  creep  into  the  plays.  That 
the  Irish  playwrights  know  how  to  create  good,  high-spirited 
fun  is  shown  in  Mayne's  The  Turn  of  the  Road  and  The  Drone 
which  show  the  humor  and  grace  of  homely  life  in  North  Ireland, 
just  as  Robinson's  The  Whit e-headed  Bov  is  from  beginning  to 
end  a good-natured,  intensely  funny  comedy  of  County  Cork. 

The  ability  to  produce  real  tragedy  out  of  Irish  life  is  shown 
in  John  Ferguson.  The  Birthright.  Maurice  Harte.  Thomas  Muskerrv 
and  others;  yet  the  authors  of  all  these  plays  do  at  times 
show  amateurish  exaggeration  of  the  effect  they  are  trying  to 
produce  * 

In  all  of  the  plays  of  this  group  except  The  Mineral 
Workers  the  atmosphere  is  that  of  actual  life  on  Irish  farms  or 
in  Irish  towns.  Most  of  the  scenes  are  laid  in  the  all-purpose 
room  of  the  Irish  cottage,  the  kitchen  with  its  bare  furniture 
and  turf  fire.  The  characters  usually  are  homely  individuals 
of  single  motives  and  no  great  culture.  Instead  of  the  mystic 
landscapes  and  heroic  figures  of  Yeats's  drama  we  have  small 
bits  of  land  to  which  prosaic,  hard-handed  individuals  must 
give  their  lives.  Instead  of  the  wild  imagination  and  reckless 


' 

* 


■ 


. 


-27- 


gay  ety  of  Synge's  Galway  peasants  we  have  a heavy-footed 
peasantry  contented  with  a life  with  no  imaginative  flavor. 

The  atmosphere  of  these  plays  is  not  the  thing  of  poetic 
glamour  and  imaginative  sparkle  which  to  the  national  dramatists 
was  the  aspect  of  Irish  life  worth  portraying. 

Many  of  the  realists  have  used  a thoroughly  modern 
device  in  giving  this  sense  of  actuality,  of  unified  impression 
to  those  who  must  depend  upon  the  printed  page  for  their  know- 
ledge of  the  plays:  that  is,  in  the  use  of  stage  directions 
which  are  not  mere  theatrical  manager's  jargon.  To  take  for 
example  a play  by  each  of  four  different  writers,  Ervine,  Murray 
Mayne  and  Robinson.  The  opening  descriptions  on  The  Magnani- 
mous Lover  hint  at  the  very  essence  of  Ulster  Protestant  life 
in  the  mention  of  the  oleograph  of  King  William  the  Third  cross- 
ing the  Boyne  and  in  the  telling  over  of  mottoes  on  the  wall: 
"What  shall  it  Profit  a Man  though  he  Gain  the  Whole  World,  if 
he  Lose  his  own  Soul;”  "Blessed  are  the  Humble  and  Weak;" 

"God  is  Here;"  "Thou  God  seest  me."  In  The  Birthright  the 
following  stage  direction  is  typical  of  the  atmospheric  heighten 
-ing  Murray  habitually  uses:  "Bat's  heavy  step  is  heard  again. 
Maura  throws  a shawl  around  her  and  takes  a candle  off  the 
dresser.  As  the  latch  is  lifted  she  draws  the  bolt  and  with 
feverish  haste  hands  out  the  candle.  The  kitchen  is  very 

dimly  lit  by  the  glow  of  the  fire."  With  a few  words  at  the 

opening  of  The  Turn  of  the  Road  Mayne  shows  us  the  whole  busy. 


' 


' 


-28- 


homely  setting  of  the  Granahan  family:  "Opposite  there  is  a 
fireplace  with  projecting  breasts  in  which  a turf  fire  is 
glowing.  Mrs.  Granahan  and  Ellen  are  engaged  at  the  table 
washing  and  drying  the  plates  after  the  supper.  Thomas  Gran- 
ahan, the  grandfather,  is  seated  at  the  fireplace  and  has 
evidently  just  finished  his  stirabout.”  But  still  more  remin- 
iscent of  the  charming  use  of  stage  directions  characteristic 
of  Barker  and  Barrie  are  these  in  The  White-headed  Boy.  ”‘Tis 
too  high  notions  poor  William  always  had — and  his  sister  Ellen, 
worse  again  than  himself,  craning  after  anything  new  she's  be 
like  a cow  through  a fence— but  indeed  William’s  notions  didn't 
stand  too  well  to  him,  and  when  he  died  he  left  his  family — 
six  of  them — no  less— in  a poor  enough  way."  In  this  play 
the  effect  of  jollity  and  high  spirits  is  cleverly  intensified 
by  the  use  of  narrative  exit  directions  as:  "Kate's  off  to  the 
kitchen  now.  Amn't  I after  telling  you  she's  a great  help 
to  her  mother?"  and  "Here's  Kate  back  again  with  the  toasting- 
fork;"  or  "She's  all  in  a flutter.  Wisha,  she's  cracked 
about  Denis.  Tien't  so  easy  to  stir  George— he's  read  it 
now . " 

To  realize  how  far  removed  such  directions  are  from 
those  of  Yeats  who  rejected  the  modern  theory  of  detailed 
and  literary  stage  directions,  one  has  only  to  compare  them 
with  the  following  very  typical  direction:  "Steps  before  the 
Palace  of  King  Guaire . A table  in  front  of  steps  at  one 


' 


* 


. 


-39- 


side  with  food  on  it,  and  a bench  by  table.  Seanchan  lying 
on  steps.  Pupils  before  steps.  King  on  the  upper  step 
before  a curtained  door."1 

Critics  have  usually  agreed  that  unity  of  impression 
is  more  easily  obtained  in  plays  in  which  physical  action  is 
not  so  important  as  psychological.  Since  the  dramas  of  Ibsen 
showed  so  conclusively  the  intense  dramatic  effects  to  be  de- 
rived from  purely  mental  conflict,  there  has  been  a steadily 
growing  tendency  on  the  part  of  most  of  the  best  dramatists 
to  stress  that  type  of  action.  But  Yeats  with  his  pre-occupa- 
tion with  heroic  legends  would  naturally  depend  largely  upon 
physical  action;  Lady  Gregory’s  farces  naturally  could  not  make 
use  of  Ibsen's  principle,  and  Synge's  rejection  of  the  drama 
of  ideas  predisposed  him  against  it . In  the  peasant  plays 
of  both  the  latter  there  is  a good  deal  of  physical  action. 

The  plays  of  the  young  realists  are  in  this  respect 
as  in  so  many  others  much  influenced  by  continental  standards. 
The  action  of  Murray's  Maurice  Harte  is  as  purely  psychological 
as  any  of  Ibsen's  plays,  in  its  stress  on  the  clash  of  the  in- 
dividual and  the  group  with  the  resulting  spiritual  tragedy 
when  the  individual  succumbs . Similarly  in  The  Birthright, 
except  for  the  exchanging  of  Hugh's  name  on  the  trunk  for 
Shane's  and  for  the  last  tragic  moment  when  the  mental  conflict 


1 . Kings  Threshold. 


. 


* 


. 


-30- 


finally  flames  into  physical  struggle  there  is  little  bodily 
action.  In  John  Ferguson  there  is  almost  no  physical  action 
on  the  stage,  though  deep  spiritual  struggle  in  Hannah,  Andrew, 
Jimmy  Caesar,  and  John  Ferguson.  Of  Ervine's  other  plays 
Mixed  Marriage  and  The  Orangeman  show  physical  action  only  in 
the  last  scenes,  and  The  Magnanimous  Lover  is  purely  psycholog- 
ical . In  the  last-mentioned  play,  at  the  end  of  the  long  con- 
versation  in  which  Maggie  Cather  has  been  probing  into  Henry's 
motives,  the  following  bit  of  dialogue  sums  up  the  whole 
struggle : 

Maggie:  You  want  to  marry  me,  Henry? 

Henry:  Because  it's  a debt  I owe  to  God.  If 
I could  save  your  soul  I'd  be  paying 
Him  back  . 

Maggie:  And  if  I don't  marry  you? 

Henry:  I shall  have  tried  all  the  same.  I 
can  do  no  more . 

Maggie:  Henry,  you're  worse  nor  I thought  you. 

You're  not  thinking  of  me  nor  the 
wrong  you  did.  It's  yourself  you're 
thinking  of.  You're  afraid  of  God, 
and  you  want  to  use  me  to  buy  Him  off  . 

You  can  well  call  yourself  a God-fearing 
man,  Henry.  I'm  nothing  to  you.  The 
child  you're  father  of  is  nothing  to 
you.  You're  just  frightened  out  of 
your  wits  for  fear  you'll  go  to  hell 
for  all  you're  saved.  I won't  marry 
you.  I'm  as  good  as  you  are  for  all 
I'm  not  saved.  I'm  better  nor  you 
are,  for  I'm  not  afraid  of  God. 

One  does  not  need  to  point  out  the  fact  that  such  a passage 

would  never  occur  in  a play  in  which  the  action  is  to  any 

considerable  extent  in  the  physical  plane. 


4 


. 


. 


-31- 


In  Colum's  plays  the  emphasis  is  altogether  upon  the 
inner  struggle.  In  The  Land  there  are  two  deep  psychological 
struggles.  One  of  these  is  between  Matt  Cosgar  and  Ellen, 
the  mutual  bond  of  their  love  balanced  by  his  affection  for 
the  land  and  by  her  desire  "to  be  doing  other  work,  and  to  be 
meeting  strange  people.  And  instead  of  bare  roads  and  market 
towns,  to  be  seeing  streets,  and  crowds  and  theaters."  The 
other  conflict  is  between  Matt  and  his  father,  old  Murtagh 
Cosgar,  who  has  driven  away  from  home  eight  children  in  his 
iron  determination  to  rule  his  family  body  and  soul.  Through- 
out this  play  there  is  little  bustling  or  idle  talk  except  in 
the  characters  of  Sally  and  Cornelius  who  are  introduced  for 
purposes  of  contrast. 

In  Thomas  Muskerrv.  although  there  are  no  long  search 
ing  dialogues  and  although  the  psychological  action  is  broken 
by  entrances  of  other  characters  and  by  new  development  of  in- 
cident, still  the  real  action  is  in  the  mind  of  the  old  master 
of  Garrisowen  as  he  is  driven  by  his  scheming  relatives,  first 
from  the  position  he  has  held  for  thirty  years,  then  into  going 
to  his  daughter's  home  instead  of  the  little  cottage  where  it 
has  been  his  cherished  dream  to  live  his  last  days  to  himself, 
and  finally  into  death  in  a pauper's  bed  because  he  would  not 
give  up  his  dream.  It  is  this  losing  struggle  which  in  the 
short  space  of  two  months  turns  him  from  a healthy,  benevolent 
elderly  man  to  the  shaken,  thick -tongued  wrack  of  a being  who 


■ 

* 


■ 

J 


-33- 


mutters  with  slack  lips  and  cheeks,  "It's — it’s— the  pau— 
pauper's  bed  they've  given  rne." 

In  The  Fiddler's  House  the  influence  of  Ibsen  is 
even  more  apparent.  The  narrow  thread  of  plot  is  carefully 
and  fully  developed  by  showing  the  inner  struggles  of  each  of 
the  characters  . The  most  subtle  example  of  this  spiritual 
conflict  is  in  the  conversation  in  which  Maire  makes  her  de- 
cision to  go  on  the  roads  with  her  father  rather  than  to  risk 
her  high-spirited  life  to  her  lover's  hard  strength. 

Maire:  Do  you  know  where  I saw  you  first,  Brian? 

Brian:  Where  was  it,  Maire? 

Maire:  In  a field  by  the  road.  You  were 
breaking  a horse. 

Brian:  I was  always  a good  hand  with  a horse. 

Maire:  The  poor  beast  was  covered  with  foam  and 
sweat  and  at  last  you  made  it  still . 

I thought  it  was  grand  then.  Are  your 
brothers  with  you,  Brian? 

Brian:  (with  somber  passion)  No.  My  brothers 
are  not  with  me.  I quarreled  with  them 
all,  and  I'm  nearly  heartbroken  for 
what  I did . 

Maire:  Ah  Brian  MacConnell,  I don't  know  what 
to  say  to  you  at  all . 

When  she  refuses  to  give  him  her  promise,  he  asks,  "How  was 
I to  know  that  you  would  take  that  quarrel  to  heart?"  and  she 
replies:  "I  thought  you  were  strong,  but  I see  now  that  you 
are  only  a man  who  forces  himself  to  harsh  behavior.  I have 
my  own  way  to  go;  my  father  wants  to  go  back  to  the  roads,  and 
it's  right  that  I should  be  with  him,  to  watch  over  him." 


• ' 

• 

■ 

1 


-33- 


V/hen  Brian  asks  despairingly  what  shelter  she  will  have  on  the 
road,  she  answers,  "I’ll  have  the  quiet  of  evening,  and  my  own 
thoughts,  and  I'll  follow  the  music;  I'll  laugh  and  hold  up 
my  head  again.”  There  is  a restraint  about  this  choice  which 
recalls  Nora  Helmer’s  last  words  to  her  husband. 

Of  Robinson's  plays  The  Clancy  Name  and  The  Patriots 
contain  the  most  searching  internal  conflict  . In  the  former 
play  the  entire  struggle  is  developed  in  the  dialogue  of  the 
ka>lf-crazed  boy  who  begs  for  the  relief  of  confession  and  his 
mother  whose  pride  of  family  name  will  perish  if  it  is  known 
that  a Clancy  was  a murderer.  Even  to  the  last  lines  of  the 
play  there  is  only  quiet,  tense  conflict  between  mother  and 
son,  although  the  stage  is  full  of  excited  neighbors  who  do 
not  understand  the  significance  of  John's  broken  words  fran- 
tically hushed  by  Mrs.  Clancy.  In  The  Patriots  the  plot  de- 
velops almost  completely  in  the  dialogue  which  skillfully  re- 
lates the  past  events  of  James  Nugent's  agitator  life,  his 
hoarding  his  strength  during  the  eighteen  years  of  prison  life, 
his  flaming  desire  to  serve  his  country  in  his  own  way,  his 
disillusionment  as  to  the  spirit  of  Ireland,  and  finally  his 
surrender  to  the  commonplaceness  about  him  when  he  realizes 
how  much  misery  his  patriotic  fervor  has  brought  to  his  friends 
and  family  . There  is  something  of  the  spirit  of  Brand  in 
this  old  rebel  who  must  give  all  to  his  country,  and  in  the 
tragic  quality  of  his  failure.  Artistically,  The  Patriots 


.. 

* 


-34- 


ia  the  best  of  Robinson’s  plays,  although  it  is  unfortunate 
in  having  its  thesis  so  soon  disproved  by  the  events  of  the 
Easter  uprising.  Both  The  Cross-Roads  and  The  Harvest  fall 
far  short  of  the  other  two  in  the  admission  of  the  blustering 
and  brutal  show  of  physical  violence  in  the  first  and  in  the 
lack  of  any  deep  reading  of  the  thought  lives  of  the  Hurley  fam- 
ily in  the  latter.  There  is  an  attempt  to  do  this  in  the 
character  of  Mary  but  somehow  she  fails  to  ring  true  in  her 
insistence  that  she  cannot  live  away  from  the  alluring  ex- 
citements of  London. 

The  White-headed  Bov  illustrates  a peculiar  char- 
acteristic of  the  Irish  realists  that  no  matter  how  painstaking 
they  are  in  making  their  serious  plays  full  of  intellectual 
content,  when  they  come  to  write  comedy,  the  work  of  their 
countryman,  Shaw,  has  no  influence  whatsoever  upon  them.  All 
the  comedies  of  the  entire  group,  The  White-headed  Bov.  The 
Turn  of  the  Road.  The  Drone . The  Mineral  Workers,  and  The 
Family  Failing  are  full  of  stirring  about,  entrances  and  exits, 
short,  smart  dialogues,  showing  little  reflective  depth.  The 
observations  of  Uncle  Bartle  and  Grandfather  Granahan  are,  per- 
haps, the  only  philosophical  elements  in  any  of  these  comedies. 
It  would  seem  that  Mayne  and  Boyle  use  these  old  men  somewhat 
as  Maeterlinck  uses  them,  as  a substitute  for  the  ancient  Greek 
chorus  . At  any  rate  the  atmosphere  of  the  comedies  is  always 
that  of  hustling  activity;  it  rarely  seems  slap-stick  farce. 


' 

* 

* 


-35- 


though  there  are  moments  when  it  approaches  this  lowest  type 
of  drama.  It  is  interesting,  however,  to  notice  that  in  spite 
of  its  poor  technical  structure  (almost  nothing  happens  in  the 
whole  first  act),  Mayne's  The  Drone  is  perhaps  the  best  comedy 
in  modern  Irish  literature,  excepting  only  Synge’s  plays. 

In  the  case  of  the  authors  who  have  only  single  dramas 
to  their  credit,  there  is  a notable  placing  of  the  action  in 
mental  struggle.  MacDonagh's  When  the  Dawn  is  Come,  while 
covering  the  space  of  time  necessary  for  the  battle  in  which 
Thurlough  is  wounded  and  for  the  two  councils  to  be  held,  is 
really  only  a long  exposition  of  the  motives  and  mental  make-up 
of  the  hero  who  by  his  deep,  almost  super-human  vision  can  see 
farther  than  his  companions  and  by  his  courage  is  willing  to 
risk  more  than  they  for  what  they  are  all  fighting.  He  is 
the  true  dreamer  who  must  lose  himself  in  proving  the  worth  of 
his  dream.  Joyce’s  The  Exiles,  a recent  ambitious  attempt 
at  the  drama  of  ideas,  is  as  static  from  a physical  standpoint 
as  Rosmersholm . Unbroken  dialogues  pages  in  length  compose 
the  action,  which  is  really  only  an  exposition  of  how  and  why 
certain  extreme  types  of  character  react  in  a very  ordinary 
situation.  Joseph  Campbell's  Judgment  in  spite  of  containing 
a death  scene  and  an  Irish  wake  lacks  any  considerable  amount 
of  action.  In  the  first  act  there  is  talk  of  the  demented 
old  tinker  woman.  Peg  Straw,  and  one  hears  her  cries  as  the 
other  tinkers  beat  her.  At  the  end  of  the  act  she  crawls  to 


-36- 


the  cabin  to  die.  The  second  and  third  acts  although  dealing 
with  Peg's  wake  and  full  of  the  atmospheric  wildness  of  Donegal 
mountainsides  contain  no  action  other  than  that  which  results 
from  a stranger's  quarrelsomeness.  When  the  watching  peasants 
realize  that  the  stranger  is  Peg's  son  he  is  turned  out  of 
doors  quietly  and  decently. 

If  in  this  treatment  of  action  the  young  realists 
have  rejected  the  theories  of  Yeats  they  have  still  further 
rejected  his  method  of  poetic  symbolism.  The  rare  instances 
of  symbolism  found  in  their  plays  are  always  of  a type  entirely 
different  from  that  of  Yeats.  The  "man-headed  birds"  in 
Shadowy  Waters  and  the  fairy  songs  in  Land  of  Heart's  Desire 
symbolizing  imaginative  longing  for  freedom  are  replaced  in 
the  later  drama  by  the  beggar's  fiddle  which  in  The  Turn  of  the 
Road  stands  for  Robbie  John's  restless  longing  to  escape  the 
narrow  restriction  of  his  home  and  give  himself  to  his  art. 

The  fiery  patriotism  of  James  Nugent  symbolizes  the  spirit  of 
his  generation,  but  it  is  a very  different  sort  of  symbolism 
from  the  gold  helmet  of  Yeats's  play  upon  patriotic  motivation. 
A symbol  typical  of  the  realists  is  the  union  of  Hugh  Rainey 
and  Nora  O'Connor  in  Mixed  Marriage  as  symbolic  of  the  best 
union  of  Protestants  and  Catholics  . Mrs  . Rainey  expresses  the 
idea  thus:  "When  ye're  as  ould  as  A am  ye'll  know  that  your 
own  need  is  the  wurl's  need.  It's  love  that  Nora  an'  Hugh 
need  an'  it's  love  the  wurl  needs.  Ye're  wrong  til  be  sug- 


. 


. 


-37- 


gestin'  partin'  til  them.  Can't  ye  3ee,  they're  doin'  the 
very  thing  ye  want  Irelan'  t'  do?  It's  Cathlik  an'  Prodestan 
joinin'  hands  thegither."  In  the  same  way  the  huge,  heavy 
drum  which  the  McClurgs  have  always  carried  in  the  Orange 
procession  symbolizes  Ulster  bigotry  in  The  Orangeman . Again, 
taking  to  the  old  easy  chair  in  The  Family  Failing  represents 
the  family  weakness  of  laziness.  By  comparing  such  homely 
symbols  as  these  with  the  poetic,  fanciful  symbolism  of  Yeats's 
plays  one  realizes  something  of  how  consciously  the  young 
playwrights  must  have  chosen  to  follow  continental  realistic 
standards . 

Another  aspect  of  this  realism  of  theirs  is  in  their 
rigid  exclusion  of  all  elements  which  might  seem  accidental  or 
adventitious.  In  but  few  instances  does  one  feel  that  there 
is  any  improbability  in  the  actions  of  the  characters  . The 
most  outstanding  examples  of  insecure  motivation  are  in  The 
Mineral  Workers  and  The  Cross-Roads  . The  former  is  full  of 
accidental  coincidences  which  provide  "laughs”  but  do  not  give 
any  illusion  of  reality . The  plot  of  the  latter  play  is  based 
upon  a double  improbability:  first,  that  a girl  of  Ellen's 
refinement  and  spirit  could  give  herself  to  a man  like  Tom 
Dempsey,  who  when  he  comes  to  her  after  their  parents  have 
arranged  the  match,  orders  her  to  come  out  to  him,  shouting 
angrily,  "What  the  devil's  keeping  you,  can't  you  come  on  out?" 
But  if  one  can,  by  a stretch  of  imagination,  grant  that  Ellen 


. 


* 


' 


-38- 


could  marry  this  type  of  man,  it  is  utterly  impossible  to 
believe  that  the  loveless  marriage  could  put  "a  black  curse 
on  the  farm"  so  that  the  up-to-date  agricultural  methods  ad- 
vocated by  Ellen  make  her  neighbors  rich,  while  at  the  same 
time  ruining  the  Dempsey  farm,  destroying  the  fertility  of  the 
land,  and  causing  the  stock  and  even  Ellen's  own  children  to 
die . 

With  the  exception  of  these  two  plays,  so  often  noted 
as  exceptions  to  so  many  different  artistic  practices,  there 
is  little  weak  motivation.  The  tragic  situation  of  fratricide 
in  The  Birthright,  one  of  the  most  difficult  to  work  up  to, 
is  rendered  thoroughly  probable  by  Shane's  years  of  repressed 
feeling  against  his  mother's  partiality  and  by  Hugh's  shock  of 
disappointment  in  being  suddenly  thrust  out  of  what  he  had  all 
his  life  supposed  to  be  his  birthright.  If  anything  more 
were  necessary  to  give  probability,  even  inevitability  to  the 
outcome,  it  is  to  be  had  in  the  fact  that  the  action  is  in  the 
gloom  and  unreality  which  any  poorly  lighted  room  has  in  the 
very  early  hours  of  morning . 

Another  situation  difficult  to  motivate  is  in 
Mixed  Marriage  when  Nora  runs  out  into  the  crowd  of  rioters  to 
meet  her  death.  But  this  apparently  mad  action  seems  probable 
when  one  understands  her  remorse  as  she  begins  to  doubt  her- 
self and  to  feel  that  by  refusing  to  give  up  Hugh  she  has  been 
the  cause  of  this  bloody  disturbance.  When  one  comprehends 


■ 

' 


■- 


-39- 


the  extreme  nervousness  which  makes  her  start  at  Rainey's 
shadow,  and  finally  ask  excitedly,  "If  A was  t'  die  mebbe  it 
wild  put  things  right?",  one  does  not  question  her  action. 

The  other  of  Ervine's  plays  where  the  situation  is  difficult 
enough  to  require  a fairly  skilled  dramatist  to  handle  it 
successfully  is  John  Ferguson.  The  play  is  undoubtedly  marred 
by  the  introduction  of  "Clutie  John"  who  finally  goads  Andrew 
into  avenging  his  sister's  wrong.  "Clutie  John"  belongs  to 
the  long  line  of  half-fools  who  have  so  fascinated  dramatists, 
and  who  invariably  have  flashes  of  deeper  insight  than  have 
the  chief  characters.  Unquestionably  "Clutie  John"  is  more 
than  slightly  improbable  and  stereotyped.  But  the  really 
great  situation  in  the  play,  the  resignation  of  John  Ferguson 
to  the  cruel  fate  which  has  overtaken  him,  is  handled  skill- 
fully, in  almost  masterly  fashion.  The  habits  of  all  his 
past  life  and  the  ideal  of  patient  endurance  which  he  has  been 
building  through  the  years  of  smaller  trouble  are  strong  enough 
to  account  for  his  submission  to  the  final  catastrophe  that 
his  only  son  shall  die  on  the  gallows  for  a confessed  crime. 

As  a rule  the  motivation  of  the  shorter  plays  is  as 
careful  as  that  of  these  long  plays  just  discussed.  Mrs. 
Clancy's  forcing  John  to  die  unshriven  with  the  load  of  his 
guilt  on  his  mind  is  explicable  by  her  natural  hardness  and  by 
her  inordinate  pride  of  family  name.  Maurice  Harte's  insanity 
is  the  natural  result  of  the  unendurably  high  nervous  tension 
put  upon  his  sensitive  and  extremely  conscientious  nature  at 


■ 


-40- 


a time  when  he  is  greatly  overworked  with  pre-ordination  study. 
M&ggie  Cather  refuses  Henry  Hinde  in  The  Magnanimous  Lover 
as  much  because  she  fears  the  hideous  life  she  will  have  to 
live  with  him  as  because  of  her  old  anger  with  him  and  her 
present  contempt  for  him.  Maire  Hourican  refuses  her  lover 
both  because  she  is  afraid  of  his  masterful  ways  and  because 
she  has  some  of  her  father's  love  for  the  adventure  of  the 
life  on  the  roads . The  plays  of  Padraic  Pearse,  poetic  and 
slight  in  plot  as  they  are,  are  still  done  with  a good  deal  of 
attention  to  the  rules  governing  dramatic  motivation. 

In  general  it  would  seem  that  in  this  respect  at 
least  the  young  writers  have  carefully  heeded  an  admonition  of 
Yeats:  "The  moment  we  depart  even  a little  from  folk  tradition 
as  we  must  in  the  drama,  if  we  do  not  know  the  best  that  has 
been  said  and  written  in  the  world,  we  do  not  know  even  our- 
selves . It  is  no  great  labor  to  know  the  best  dramatic  liter- 
ature for  there  is  little  of  it.  We  Irish  must  know  it  all, 
for  we  have,  I think,  far  greater  need  of  the  severe  discipline 
of  French  and  Scandinavian  drama  than  of  Shapespeare 's  luxur— 

iance Let  us  learn  construction  from  the  masters,  and 

dialogue  from  ourselves.”^ 

It  has  been  shown  that  in  atmosphere  and  technical 
methods  the  later  Irish  dramatists  differ  greatly  from  the 
founders  of  the  modern  Irish  dramatic  renaissance;  in  the  last 


L-  Samhyji^  1901;  in  Collected  Works.  Vol . IV. 


■ 


♦ 


-41- 


analysis,  however,  the  respect  in  which  they  depart  farthest 
from  the  National  group  is  in  dramatic  purpose.  Their  work 
shows  little  or  no  tendency  to  attempt  with  Yeats  and  Synge 
"to  re-discover  an  art  of  the  theatre  that  shall  be  joyful, 
fantastic,  extravagant,  whimsical,  beautiful,  resonant,  and 
altogether  reckless".  And  they  disagree  entirely  with  Yeats's, 
"We  are,  it  may  be,  very  stupid  in  thinking  that  the  average 
man  is  a fit  subject  at  all  for  the  finest  art."1  Much  more 
appealing  to  them  is  the  dramatic  art  which  is  a means  of  im- 
proving the  social  order  of  their  day.  If  Henderson  was 
correct  in  his  generalization  upon  the  characteristic  drama  of 
to-day  as  embodying  the  social  fervor  of  the  age,  it  is  easy 
to  see,  even  with  a cursory  examination,  that  the  Irish  play- 
wrights of  to-day  have  accepted  implicitly  the  standard  of 
their  age.  They,  like  the  continental  and  English  and  American 
dramatists  mentioned  by  Henderson,  strive  to  be  "leaders,  not 
merely  spokesmen  of  the  ideas  and  feelings  of  the  motley  throng 
assembled  in  the  play-house." 

These  writers  are  interested  neither  in  glorifying 
and  extracting  beauty  from  Irish  tradition  as  Yeats  was,  nor 
in  getting  fun  from  the  picturesqueness  of  the  peasant  as 
Synge  had  done.  The  story  drama  has  little  attraction  for 
them.  The  most  significant  single  statement  of  the  dramatic 


1.  Ibid.,  p.  72. 


. 

* 


■ 

_ 

■ 


' 


-42- 


purpose  of  these  realists  if  that  of  St . John  Ervine  in  The 
Forum  of  August  1914:  "The  terrible  danger  of  the  Irish  people 
is  that  they  may  find  plenty  of  food  for  their  bellies,  but 

find  none  for  their  souls — The  incredible  wrangling 

over  the  question  of  the  Municipal  Art  Gallery  in  Dublin;  the 
brutal  manner  in  which  the  employers  conducted  the  lock-out 
in  1913;  the  terrible  record  of  the  gombeen  men  in  the  little 
lonely  towns  and  parishes  throughout  the  country;  the  dreadful 
story  of  the  Dublin  slums  and  the  sweated  industries  of  Belfast; 
the  bestial  bigotry  in  which  Ulster  is  envelopedl  all  of  these 
things  have  become  plain  in  the  bright  light  of  the  prosperity 
which  has  now  risen  in  Ireland;  and  it  is  the  plain  duty  of 
the  artist  to  tell  these  things  as  it  is  his  plain  duty  to  tell 
of  a proud  spirit  when  the  proud  spirit  is  alive.” 

That  Ervine  was  expressing  the  belief  of  the  whole 
group  of  writers  under  discussion  is  clearly  shown  by  an  analy- 
sis of  the  plays  as  to  themes  and  method  of  treatment.  In 
at  least  half  of  the  plays  the  hard,  unimaginative,  fairly 
prosperous  peasant  figures.  Murtagh  Cosgar,  Mike  and  Tom 
Dempsey,  Tumour  in  Thomas  Muskerrv.  Bat  Morrissey  in  The 
Birthright . William  John  and  Samuel  James  Granahan  in  The  Turn 
of  the  Road,  the  McMinns  and  John  Murray  in  The  Drone,  all  of 
the  Grogans  in  The  Building  Fund.  Dan  Fogarty  in  The  Mineral 
Workers . and  Tom  Carragher  in  The  Family  Failing,  are  the  most 
striking  examples  of  this  present  day  reading  of  the  Irish 


. 


* 


- 

. 


. 


-43- 


peasant  with  his  over-weening  love  of  the  land  which  leads 
him  into  various  undesirable  modes  of  thought.  As  a discus- 
sion of  this  new  peasant  genre  is  reserved  for  a later  chapter, 
it  is  sufficient  to  note  here  that  in  presenting  the  peasants 
in  this  light  the  playwrights  seem  to  be  trying  definitely  and 
consciously  to  bring  Irishmen  to  a realization  of  the  evils  of 
common  life  in  their  country. 

In  some  of  the  plays  the  purpose  of  the  author  is  so 
clear  that  the  theme  becomes  almost  propagandists . Robinson's 
Harvest . for  instance,  is  a warm  protest  against  the  old  edu- 
cational system  which  trained  Irish  children  away  from  the  farm 
and  unfitted  them  for  their  natural  duties,  this  system  being 
personified  in  William  Lordan,  the  old  school-master  who  prides 
himself  in  having  made  his  pupils  dissatisfied  with  the  coarse, 
"narrow"  life  at  Knockmalgoss  . Another  play  dealing  with  a 
similar  theme  is  Maurice  Harte.  which,  while  not  so  directly 
propagandistic  as  Harvest . is  nevertheless  a forceful  argument 
against  a social  system  which  limits  the  value  of  educational 
training  to  the  priesthood.  The  Cross-Roads  is  directed 
against  the  Irish  patriarchal  marriage  system  which  means  love- 
less marriages.  The  Patriots  is  a cry  against  the  new  re- 
formist methods  of  compromise  which  Robinson  believed  to  have 
killed  the  Irish  spirit.  In  one  sense  the  play  is  an  attempt 
to  arouse  the  whole  fighting  spirit  which  had  temporarily 
lulled.  The  tragic  situation  of  Seumas  O'Kelly's  The  Bribe 


. 

' 


■ 


■ 


' 


-44- 

springs  from  the  corruption  of  Irish  petty  politics;  and  Boyle's 
comedy  The  Eloquent  Dempsey  deals  with  the  contemptible  tactics 
of  the  petty  politician.  The  Mineral  Workers  attempts  to  show 
the  Irish  their  short-sightedness  and  narrowness  in  refusing 
to  allow  their  "bit  of  land"  to  be  disturbed  under  any  consider- 
ation of  commercial  or  national  or  industrial  prosperity  . 

Ireland  is  personified  by  Dan  Fogarty  who  prefers  to  wreck  the 
venture  rather  than  give  the  right  of  way  through  his  tiny 
farm,  and  who  brags  of  his  financial  acumen  when  he  sells  cab- 
bages to  the  miners  while  his  neighbors'  land  is  being  ruined. 

In  the  end,  of  course,  Fogarty  is  forced  to  surrender  to  modern- 
ity symbolized  by  the  mine . Still  another  play.  Mixed  Marriage 
is  a passionate  plea  to  the  people  of  Ireland,  in  this  case  the 
plea  being  for  more  tolerance.  A particular  stress  is  laid 
upon  the  fact  that  religious  bigotry  is  especially  disastrous 
to  the  workers  . 

If  the  plays  just  mentioned  are  almost  direct  appeals 
for  certain  social  reforms,  practically  all  the  other  plays  of 
the  group  contain,  directly  or  indirectly,  reproof  for  certain 
phases  of  Irish  character.  The  Drone  and  The  Family  Failing 
show  how  the  laziness  and  perpetual  dreaming  to  which  a certain 
type  of  Irishman  is  given  results  in  degeneration  of  moral 
fibre.  On  the  other  hand,  there  is  a protest  against  the 
domineering  peasant  who  attempts  to  force  his  children  into 
beaten  paths  in  The  Land.  The  Fiddler's  House.  The  Clancy  Name. 
Maurice  Harte.  The  Turn  of  the  Road,  and  Mixed  Marriage . 


' 


, 


-45- 


The  intolerance  and  bigotry  of  Ulster  is  roundly  satirized  in 
The  Turn  oi  the  Road.  The  Magnanimous  Lover « Mixed  Marriage 
and.  The  Orangeman , in  fact  in  most  of  the  plays  by  the  Ulster 
dramatists . 

Further  detailed  examination  would  show  that  with 
the  exceptions  of  Fitzmaurice ' s fantasies,  Dandy  Dolls  and 
Magic  Glasses,  there  are  no  plays  in  the  entire  group  which  do 
not  exhibit  in  some  measure  an  attempt  to  mould  Irish  thought 
and  the  character  of  Irish  peasantry.  In  general,  one  must 
feel  in  surveying  the  New  Irish  Drama  that  in  atmosphere,  in 
technical  methods,  in  spirit,  and  in  purpose,  it  resembles  the 
modern  drama  of  ideas  so  closely  as  to  indicate  conscious 
application  of  continental  principles  of  dramatic  art. 


■ 


' 


-46- 


CHAPTER  III. 

THE  NEW  PEASANT  GENRE. 

The  first  reaction  of  the  new  Irish  drama  upon  readers 
who  have  delighted  in  the  peasant  plays  of  Lady  Gregory  and 
Synge  is  apt  to  be  a certain  bewildered  and  horrified  doubt. 

Such  a reader  with  his  mind  full  of  Hyacinth  Halvey,  Christy 
Mahon,  Martin  Doul,  and  the  other  famous  folk  characters,  is 
shocked  by  the  treatment  of  peasant  life  found  in  the  new  plays. 
It  is  safe  to  assume  that  the  general  reading  public  is  ac- 
customed to  think  of  the  Irish  peasant  as  an  altogether  delight- 
ful figure,  something  like  nothing  else  human  under  the  sun, 
something  entirely  un-moral  and  irresponsible,  something  so 
credulous  as  to  believe  every  rumor  and  so  childlike  as  to 
enjoy  a "gallons  story"  which  shocks  deeply  when  seen  in  real- 
ity; a creature  of  fits  and  starts  of  passion,  of  imaginative- 
ness beyond  that  of  all  but  the  most  carefully  nurtured  in- 
dividuals of  other  lands;  a simple  pastoral  being  dressed  in 
rags  or  the  coarsest  of  homespun,  but  speaking  a rich,  lyrical 
language  with  a rhythm  which  poets  may  envy.  This  peasant  is 
a man  of  no  substance  and  with  no  desire  for  any — voluntarily 
a wanderer,  a beggar,  tramp,  or  tinker  living  in  the  open,  at 
home  anywhere,  dependent  for  his  next  meal  upon  the  favor  of 
God  and  his  own  wit;  with  Christy  going  "romancing  through  a 
romping  lifetime  from  this  hour  to  the  dawning  of  the  judgment 


' 


-47- 


day.n  In  hia  highest  moments  he  is  superb  and  wild;  in  his 
most  commonplace  aspects  he  is  deliciously  naive  and  picturesque 
His  philosophy  of  life  is  in  the  gusto  of  the  tramp  who  says 
to  Nora  Burke  in  The  Shadow  of  the  Glen.  "You’ll  be  hearing 
the  herons  crying  out  over  the  black  lakes  and  you’ll  be  hearing 
the  grouse  and  the  owls  with  them,  and  the  larks  and  the  big 
thrushes  when  the  days  are  warm:  and  it’s  not  from  the  like  of 
them  you'll  be  hearing  a tale  of  getting  old  like  Peggy  Cavan- 
agh,  and  losing'  the  hair  off  you  and  the  light  of  your  eyes, 
but  it’s  the  fine  songs  you'll  be  hearing  when  the  sun  goes 
up,  and  there'll  be  no  old  fellow  wheezing  the  like  of  a sick 
sheep  close  to  your  ear.” 

In  turning  from  this  familiar  figure  to  that  which 
has  succeeded  him,  it  is  interesting  to  compare  the  literary 
motives  of  the  National  writers  as  explained  by  Synge  to  those 
of  the  present  day  writers  as  summed  up  by  St  . John  Ervine  . 

Said  Synge  in  discussing  the  use  of  the  peasant  as  dramatic 
material:  "In  countries  where  the  imagination  of  the  people, 
and  the  language  they  use,  is  rich  and  living,  it  is  possible 
for  the  writer  to  be  rich  and  copious  in  his  words,  and  at  the 
same  time  to  give  the  reality,  which  is  the  root  of  all  poetry 
in  a comprehensive  and  natural  form.”1  Or  again:  ”In  Ireland 
for  a few  years  more,  we  have  a popular  imagination  that  is 


1.  Preface  to  Playboy  of  the  Western  World. 


. ; 


-48- 


fiery  and  magnificent  and  tender;  so  that  those  of  us  who  wish 
to  write  start  with  a chance  that  is  not  given  to  writers  in 
places  where  the  spring  time  of  the  local  life  is  forgotten, 
and  the  harvest  is  a memory  only."1 2  The  logical  result  of 
such  a view  of  the  peasant  is  the  drama  of  imagination  of  the 
National  writers. 

Contrast  with  such  a view  the  statement  of  Ervine: 

"The  Irish  dramatist  writes  his  plays  around  peasant  character 
because  peasant  life  is  the  national  life,  because  peasant 

influence  is  the  strongest  influence  in  Ireland The 

Irish  peasant  has  remained  national  and  local,  but  the  Irish 
- lord  and  middle-class  man  have  become  de-nat ionalized,  aping 
the  English  in  thought  and  act  and  speech.  The  Irish  dramatist 
is  compelled  to  make  the  peasant  the  protagonist  of  his  plays, 
for  the  peasant  has  national  courage  and  meanness,  cowardice 
and  nobility,  humor  and  the  lack  of  it,  cruelty  and  gentleness, 
high  feeling  and  low  feeling,  wit  and  dullness,  generosity  and 
greed  all  mingled  in  his  nature;  and  these  things  are  the  stuff 
of  drama."  The  logical  result  of  this  artistic  conception 
is  a realistic  figure  whose  fancies  are  no  wilder  and  whose 
words  are  no  more  musical  than  those  of  the  actual  flesh  and 
blood,  weather-beaten,  gombeen  haunted,  unlettered  peasant  . 

On  the  other  hand  one  discovers  soon  after  beginning 

1 . Ibid . 

2.  The  Irish  Dramatist  and  the  Irish  People:  The  Forum. 

June,  1914. 


* 


-48- 


to  study  the  new  treatment  of  rural  character  that  if  the  Irish 
peasant  has  had  his  wings  clipped  and  his  feet  securely  an- 
chored to  reality,  he  is  not,  except  in  rare  instances  like 
Tom  Dempsey  in  The  Cross-Roads,  the  brutal,  utterly  debased 
being  described  by  Tolstoy,  Hauptmann,  and  the  other  contin- 
ental writers  of  naturalistic  peasant  drama.  Unlike  them  he 
does  not  reek  of  the  barnyard  until  delicate  sensibilities  are 
offended  to  nausea.  His  is  rather  the  atmosphere  of  narrow 
boundaries,  of  too  much  tea-drinking  with  cronies  of  no  wider 
outlook  than  his  own,  of  too  great  pre-occupation  with  the 
acres  and  cottage  which  are  his— in  short,  of  too  little  "food 
i or  his  soul"  as  Ervine  said.  There  are  many  evident  traces 
of  naturalistic  influence  throughout  these  new  Irish  plays; 
a little  of  the  feeling  expressed  by  Zola,  "There  is  a tinge 
of  the  human  beast  in  all  of  us  as  there  is  a tinge  of  illness." 
But  there  is  never  the  extreme  of  Zola  that  "to  make  character 
mortal,  everything  must  be  told."^  There  is  not  even  an  ex- 
treme carrying  out  of  the  basis  of  naturalism,  man's  utter 
helplessness  at  the  hands  of  Nature.  To  quote  Zola  again, 

"Man  is  no  longer  an  intellectual  abstraction  for  them  natur- 
alistic dramatists  ; he  is  a thinking  beast,  who  forms  part 
of  Nature  and  who  is  subject  to  the  multiplicity  of  influences 
of  the  soil  on  which  he  grows  and  where  he  lives."2 


1.  Zola:  The  Experimental  Novel . p.  127. 
3.  Ibid. . p.  151. 


' 


-50- 


How  carefully  these  plays  avoid  the  extreme  of  natur- 
alism is  to  be  seen  in  examination  of  the  last  speech  of  Tom 
Dempsey  in  The  Cross-Roads,  which  is,  as  has  been  said,  the 
only  deeply  naturalistic  one  of  the  plays.  The  lines  are: 

"I'll  tell  you  what  I'm  doing.  I'm  locking  the  door  the  way 
you  won't  go  out  after  that  young  man;  an'  I'm  going  to  step 
down  to  the  village  now  for  a sup  of  drink.  An'  then — I 'm 
coming  back ; an'  by  God,  I'll  make  you  pay  for  this  night's 
work,  Ellen  McCarthy,  till  you'll  wish  you  were  dead — the  black 
curse  you  brought  on  this  farm  an'  for  the  liking  you  have  to 
the  young  man.”  Dark  and  hopeless  as  the  situation  is  when 
the  key  "turns  in  the  lock  with  a sound  of  dreadful  finality," 
it  is  pale  in  comparison  with  some  of  the  effects  of  The  Powers 
of  Darkness . Before  Sunrise,  or  even  the  last  scene  of  Ghosts  ♦ 
But  the  significant  fact  is  that  the  play  was  done  in  Robinson's 
apprentice  years  and  he  has  since  never  returned  to  any  such 
reading  of  the  peasant  as  a "human  beast". 

Naturalism  enters  into  the  plays  of  the  Irish  realists 
in  much  the  same  degree  as  it  enters  the  plays  of  the  realists 
of  other  countries.  It  shows  in  the  choice  of  subjects  from 
the  life  of  the  humble,  in  the  lack  of  verbal  or  plot  embellish- 
ment,  in  the  creation  of  characters  neither  idealized  nor  ex- 
aggerated, in  a view  of  life  divested  of  its  romantic  aspects, 
in  a certain  level  of  character  which  excludes  at  once  both 
heroes  and  villains,  in  the  so-called  pessimistic  tendency  to 


. 


' 


call  ugly  things  by  their  right  names  instead  of  glossing  them 
over,  in  the  recognition  of  natural  laws  of  temperamental, 
biological  and  social  determinism.  With  Irish  realists  as 
with  other  contemporary  realists  there  is  not,  however,  any 
indulgence  in  the  extreme  of  naturalism  which  flowered  in  the 
slice-of -lif e drama  of  the  late  nineteenth  century.  The  new 
Irish  drama  is  an  attempt  to  portray  Irish  life  as  it  and  every 
other  life  is — sometimes  beautiful,  sometimes  ugly,  often  merely 
■prosaic  . 

If,  then,  the  treatment  of  the  peasant  of  recent 
Irish  plays  is  neither  imaginative  nor  gossipy  as  was  that  of 
the  National  drama,  nor  yet  so  darkly  naturalistic  as  most  of 
the  continental  peasant  plays,  what  is  it?  The  answer  to 
this  question  is  in  the  answer  to  a number  of  others  . What 
are  the  traits  of  character  most  emphasized  by  the  realists? 

What  conditions,  if  any,  are  advanced  as  explaining  the  type 
of  characters  depicted?  Are  the  present  day  peasants  distinct 
enough  from  their  literary  forbears  to  justify  the  critic  in 
considering  them  as  a new  genre?  How  true  are  they  to  actual 
Irish  life? 

One  of  the  first  differences  one  notices  in  these 
later  Irish  peasants  is  that  of  their  comparative  prosperity  . 
They  are  men  of  small  property,  passionately  attached  to  their 
"bit  of  land"  and  very  ill-disposed  toward  the  beggar  or  tramp 


* 


-52- 


or  tinker  of  the  earlier  plays.  Except  for  the  half-wit  Clutie 
in  the  home  of  the  Fergusons,  who  are  represented  as  unusually 
soft  and  gentle,  and  for  the  admission  of  dying  Peg  Straw  to 
the  weaver's  home  against  Nahla's  will,  there  are  only  two 
instances  where  tramps  appear  in  these  plays.  Moll  Woods, 
the  central  figure  of  0 'Kelly’s  The  Siuiler's  Child,  has  been 
made  a vagrant  by  the  unkindness  of  society,  and  unlike  Synge's 
tramps  struggles  against  her  lot.  To  her  life  in  the  open 
is  not  a joyous  listening  to  "fine  songs  when  the  sun  goes  up" 
but  a fearsome  existence  where  the  gray  stone  walls  along  the 
moon-lit  roads  are  "like  the  polished  bones  of  dead  men,"  and 
the  hedges  "stretch  out  in  front  of  me  looking  like  two  long 
arms  holding  up  winding  sheets  for  all  the  Shuiler's  of 
Ireland."  Until  her  final  sacrifice  of  her  child  Moll  meets 
nowhere  any  of  the  cordiality  traditionally  accorded  to  wan- 
derers by  the  Irish  peasant . 

The  other  admission  of  a tramp  into  the  plot  is  the 
case  of  the  drunken  fiddler  in  The  Turn  of  the  Road  who  is 
picked  up  off  the  roads  and  brought  home  by  William  James 
Granahan  to  serve  as  a "tarr'ble  and  awful  warnin'  to  Robbie 
John  what  this  sort  of  occupation  brings  a man  til."  A 
wholly  modern  attitude  towards  a tramp  is  suggested  in  Ellen's 
refusal  to  feed  the  battered  old  musician  who  has  once  been 
really  great,  and  in  Mrs.  Granahan's  firm:  "Wind  and  string 
fiddle  sticks.  Out  you  go.  Out  you  will  go.  I want  no 
tramps  in  here  upset tin'  my  house  and  makin'  it  the  talk  of 


' I 


-53- 


the  neighbors.  Out  you  go  at  once.”  This  might  be  an  irate 
American  housewife  speaking  but  never  the  National  school 
peasant  welcoming  a wanderer  in  off  the  road  with  eager  inter- 
est . Not  every  peasant  family  of  the  new  plays  is  like  the 
Granahan  family,  but  the  attitude  toward  life  is  essentially 
similar  . The  new  Irish  peasant  is,  as  a rule,  fairly  prosper- 
ous and,  it  must  be  admitted,  fairly  hard. 

One  trait  which  the  entire  group  of  dramatists  have 
emphasized  in  the  new  peasant  is  his  cunning.  Lady  Gregory 
admitted  this  quality  but  touched  it  up  with  whimsy  until  it 
is  no  more  repellent  than  an  attractive  child's  schemes  for 
a coveted  privilege;  Yeats's  tramp  in  A Pot  of  Broth  earns  his 
supper  by  a bit  of  subterfuge  which  is  thoroughly  enjoyable. 
Synge's  characters  often  have  the  same  cunning  but  described 
with  so  much  gayety  and  zest  that  one  never  thinks  of  censuring 
it.  The  most  notable  example  of  this  cunning  used  for  comic 
values  is  the  case  of  the  tinkers  who  wheedle  a priest  into 
marrying  them  for  a new  gallon  can,  then  gag  him  and  throw  him 
into  a ditch  when  he  will  not  perform  the  ceremony  until  the 
can  is  forthcoming.  But  peasant  cunning  with  the  realists 
appears  in  a different  light.  It  is  not  an  entirely  pleasant 
picture  when  William  James  Granahan,  a Sunday  School  teacher 
and  pillar  in  the  community,  boasts,  "Nine  and  thirty  year 
ha'e  I gone  til  market,  and  no  man,  woman,  child,  dog,  or  divil 
ever  got  the  better  of  me  in  a bargain  yet,  and  right  well  you 


. 


. a. ; , 


. 


■ 


— ■ 


-54- 


know  it.  I sold  the  foal  for  thirty  poun'  and  not  a ha'penny 
less — a baste  I wouldn't  buy  myself  for  thirty  shillings.” 

His  son,  Samuel  James,  further  describes  the  fair  scenes  in  a 
speech  whose  rhythm  and  humor  do  not  entirely  veil  the  author '3 
attitude:  ”Boys,  but  Da  is  the  hard  man  to  plaze.  We  stopped 
at  MacAlanan's  on  the  way  home  and  met  William  John  McKillop 
and  he  toul  the  ould  man  he  was  a fool  to  let  a good  horse  go 
at  that  price  for  he  was  lookin'  all  roads  to  give  him  forty 
poun' . Sure  I knowed  the  ould  Yahoo  hadn't  the  price  of  a 
nanny-goat.  But  of  course.  Da  tuk  it  all  in  for  gospel. 

And  me  sittin'  listenin'  to  him  tellin'  ould  McKillop  what 
a grand  action  the  foal  had  and  what  shoulders  the  baste  had 
and  the  way  it  could  draw  thirty  hundred  up  Kiltainey  hill 
without  a pech.” 


in  a trade  is  stressed.  The  neighbors  admiringly  characterize 
Mrs.  Clancy  as  "a  stiff  one  to  drive  a bargain  with”  or  as 
having  "the  divil's  own  luck"  in  her  business  transactions; 
she  herself  says  proudly,  "You  wouldn't  find  any  one  putting 
bad  coins  on  me."  The  picture  of  old  Timothy  Hurl eyJSfex^t tempt 
to  save  his  farm  by  setting  fire  to  his  barn  is  altogether 


unpleasant  . His  cackling  laughter  as  he  boasts,  "Forty  pounds 
for  one  timber  match",  is  met  by  one  son's,  "Sure  I didn't 
think  I had  a Da  with  so  much  spirit;"  the  other  son,  however, 
does  protest  hotly. 


Similarly  in  The  Clancy  Name  the  peasant's  cunning 


' 


. 


■ 


-55- 


Jack:  I'm  ashamed  of  you;  how  can  you  think 
of  such  a thing?  Why  it's — it's 
stealing  & M 

Timothy:  Sure,  who's  to  know  I done  it?  Not 
a one  saw  me  and  I lighting  the  match. 

Jack:  That  has  nothing  to  do  with  it.  Didn't 
you  see  how  dishonest  it  was? 

Timothy:  Maybe  I did,  but  I saw  something  more, 
and  that  was  that  I was  on  the  way  to 
being  put  out  of  the  farm... and  says  I 
to  myself  "'tis  time  for  Timothy  to 
turn  around  and  see  what  he  can  do." 

Maurice:  All  the  farm  wants  is  a little  money 

and  it's  hard  to  see  you  grudge  us  getting 
that  . 

Jack:  I'll  do  more  than  grudge  it— I'll  give 
information . 

Timothy:  (plaintively)  Wisha,  'tis  hard  you'd 
cross  us  now,  and  all  you  have  to  do  is 
to  hold  your  tongue . I 'm  sorry  I ever 
told  you  at  all  instead  of  keeping  it  to 
myself  but,  sure,  I thought  you'd  be 
pleased  the  same  as  Mauriceen  was 
pleased . 

This  trait  of  peasant  cunning  runs  through  all  the 
plays  of  the  group  but  is  especially  prominent  in  Boyle's 
comedies  . The  incorrigibly  lazy  Dominic  and  Joe  Donnelly 
even  go  to  the  lengths  of  enduring  a few  days  of  strenuous 
physical  labor  in  their  efforts  to  trick  their  supposedly 
wealthy  uncle  into  giving  them  money.  In  The  Mineral  Workers 
this  cunning  is  satirized  by  showing  its  weakness  when  opposed 
to  real  business  acumen.  In  the  beginning  Dan  Fogarty  brags, 
"Oh,  so  you  think  you  can  butter  me?"  And  when  in  the  end 
he  is  beaten  at  his  own  game,  his  first  thought  is,  "Out-jock- 


-56- 


eyed  by  a Yankee*.  Oh  Lord!"  In  The  Building  Fund  an  avari- 
cious old  woman  comes  to  realize  that  her  miserly  son  and 
scheming  grand-daughter  are  anxiously  waiting  the  inheritance 
which  comes  to  them  at  her  death.  Her  cunning  in  outwitting 
them  by  willing  the  farm  to  the  building  fund  for  the  new 
church  being  built  in  the  community  seems  so  heartless  and  in- 
human that  one  almost  feels  pity  for  the  victims  although  they 
certainly  richly  deserve  punishment  of  some  sort.  In  The 
Eloquent  Dempsey  are  described  the  schemes  of  a many-sided 
saloon-keeper  and  politician  to  keep  his  popularity  with  all 
factions.  In  fact  it  is  probably  this  insistent  harping  upon 
peasant  trickery  which  as  much  as  anything  else  calls  forth 
Weygandt's  criticism  of  Boyle:  "He  has  picturesque  phrase 
but  no  particular  individuality  in  using  it.  Style  he  has  not, 
nor  any  background  of  romance  or  beauty  of  that  sort  which 
illumines  the  grayness  of  the  comedies  of  Ibsen,  or  of  any 
other  sort  of  beauty  than  that  approach  to  beauty  there  is  in 
skilled  craf tmanship  . 

Another  unpleasant  trait  of  the  Irish  peasant  em- 
phasized by  the  realists  is  his  love  of  petty  power,  especially 
his  clinging  to  the  old  patriarchal  system  which  makes  a man 
absolute  master  of  his  house,  his  will  on  all  questions  to  be 
obeyed  mutely,  his  disposition  of  his  children's  future  un- 


1 • Irish  Plavs  and  Playwrights,  p . 313 . 


! 


, 


■ 

: 


‘ 


-57- 


questioned.  In  a number  of  plays,  notably  The  Land.  The 
Birthright . The  Turn  of  the  Road.  The  Mineral  Workers , The 
.Clancy  Name » The  Orangeman,  and  Mixed  Marriage  the  action 
hinges  upon  the  rebellion  against  parental  authority  which 
seems  to  be  characteristic  of  this  generation  of  Irish  youth. 
Usually  this  love  of  power  expresses  itself  in  one  of  two 
ways,  as  the  ordinary  adult  intolerance  for  the  opinions  of 
youth,  or  in  the  more  vicious  propensity  of  parents  to  force 
their  children  into  grooves  of  thought  and  action  in  which  they 
themselves  have  lived.  A rebellion  against  the  first  mentioned 
characteristic  of  the  Irish  parent  (and  for  that  matter  any 
parent  who  does  not  govern  his  natural  tendencies  severely)  is 
found  in  the  outburst  of  the  hobble-hoy  Tom  Rainey  in  Mixed 
Marriage  . 

Mrs.  Rainey:  Does  it  iver  occur  til  ye,  John, 
that  Tom's  not  a wee  lad  anny  more? 

He's  a brave  big  fella,  now. 

Rainey : He  has  no  wit . 

Tom:  Ah,  I have.  A lot  more'n  ye  think,  on'y 
ye  nivir  let  me  git  a word  out  o'  me, 
but  ye  near  snap  the  head  off  me  . 

A'm  gettin'  quaren  tired  o't,  A tell  ye. 


Rainey:  Ay,  you'll  be  lavin'  me,  too.  That's 
the  way.  Bring  up  your  childher  well, 
an'  spare  them  nothin'  an'  they'll  turn 
on  ye  in  yer  ould  age. 


Mrs.  Rainey:  Mebbe,  if  ye  wur  a bit  more  o'  a 
friend  til  them,  an'  a wee  bit  less  o' 
a father,  they  wuddent  turn  on  ye  so 
readily.  Ye're  alwis  wantin'  til 
make  them  do  things  acause  ye're  their 
father,  instead  o'  waitin'  fur  them 
til  do  it  o'  their  own  free  will. 


. 


* 


-58- 


But  more  often,  probably  because  a more  dramatic 
situation,  the  plays  treat  of  the  second  tendency  of  the  Irish 
parent.  This  also  is  considered  in  Mixed  Marriage.  Hugh, 
like  his  younger  brother,  breaks  away  from  the  dominion  of 
his  father  when  he  decrees  that  Hugh  shall  give  up  his  Catholic 
sweetheart  because  "it's  not  right  t ' be  raarryin'  out  o'  yer 
religion."  One  admires  his  spirit,  as  Ervine  meant  one  to 
do,  when,  ordered  by  his  father  to  renounce  Nora  or  leave  home, 
he  replies:  "A  don’t  care.  It’ll  be  no  grief  til  me  til  lave 
the  house.  A’m  a man,  an’  not  a chile,  an'  A 'll  choose  me 
wife  where  A like,  not  where  you  like.  A'm  not  afeard." 

And  then  to  Nora:  "Don't  be  cryin'  dear.  Sure  this  is  on'y 

a bit  o’  bother  that'll  not  last  fur  ivir We'll  be 

married  the  quicker." 

In  The  Land  there  is  a similar  situation  in  the  re- 
fusal of  Matt  Cosgar  to  turn  from  Ellen  to  obey  his  father's 
command  that  he  shall  devote  his  life  to  the  farm.  Old 
Murtagh  Cosgar,  like  Tom  Rainey,  is  hard  and  tenacious  of 
purpose,  swayed  by  his  love  of  authority.  Lack  of  dowry  and 
qualities  which  will  make  a good  farmer's  wife  are,  however, 
his  objection  to  Ellen  Douras  . His  obstinate  disapproval 
springs  from  his  besetting  sin,  passion  for  property,  just  as 
Rainey's  has  from  his  bigotry.  "Boy,  your  father  built  this 
house.  He  got  these  lands  together.  He  has  a right  to  see 
that  you  and  your  generations  are  in  the  way  of  keeping  them 


. 


-59- 


together."  Matt,  too,  loves  the  land,  but  he  is  young  and 
in  love.  Both  qualities  ill  dispose  him  to  submit  his  will 
to  his  father’s,  and  he  prepares  to  go  with  Ellen  to  New  York, 
leaving  the  farm  to  incompetent  Sally  and  Cornelius. 

It  is  not  always,  however,  love  which  impels  Irish 
youth  to  throw  off  too-heavy  parental  dominion.  Robbie  John 
Granahan  in  The  Turn  of  the  Road  half-heartedly  tries  to  obey 
his  parents  by  giving  up  his  music  because  he  wants  to  win  his 
sweetheart,  Jenny  Graeme.  But  when  she  encourages  him  to 
devote  himself  to  his  violin,  promising  to  wait  till  he  comes 
back  rich  and  famous,  he  wastes  no  moments  in  defying  his 
parents;  and  marches  blithely  out  of  the  house  with  his  father's 
curse  upon  his  head,  but  his  beloved  fiddle  under  his  arm. 

In  The  Orangeman  the  revolt  of  youth  is,  as  in  Mixed 
Marriage  and  Purcell’s  The  Enthusiast,  against  the  bigotry  which 
its  young  eyes  see  in  its  parents.  When  old  John  McClurg, 
who  has  carried  the  great  drum  at  Orange  processions  for  years, 
is  so  ill  that  he  cannot  go,  he  decrees  that  ”a  McClurg  of  some 
sort  shall  be  in  the  procession  the  morrow  to  show  the  Fenians 
what  the  Protestants  think  of  them.”  Forthwith,  he  has  the 
orange  sash  tied  to  his  son's  waist  and  the  blood-marked  drum 
put  in  his  hands . But  the  boy  will  have  none  of  it . Ordered 
to  think  of  the  Battle  of  the  Boyne,  he  declares  he  does  not 
want  to  think  of  it.  Threatened  with  disinheritance  if  he 
does  not  take  his  father's  place,  he  responds  stoutly:  ”1 


. 


. 


-60- 


wouldn't  go  near  the  field.  I’m  not  an  Orangeman,  and  I 
never  will  be.  If  you  think  I'm  going  to  bother  my  head  about 
your  ould  Orange  lodges  and  your  members  of  Parliament,  talking 
their  damned  rot,  you're  quaren  mistaken. n When  his  father 
tries  to  enforce  his  command  with  taunts  and  physical  coercion, 
the  boy  cried  wildly,  "I've  bore  a good  deal  from  you,  da, 
because  you  are  my  da,  but  I'll  bear  no  more.  I'm  sick  of 
you  and  your  ould  drum.  Damn  your  drum."  With  these  words 
he  thrusts  his  foot  through  the  historic  drum,  thus  destroying 
what  is  the  symbol  for  his  family  bigotry.  As  one  reads 
play  after  play  dealing  with  paternal  intolerance  and  hard- 
headedness,  one  does  not  much  wonder  at  Hugh  Rainey's  "It's 
a quaren  thing  when  a man  begins  to  respect  his  da." 

In  both  the  plays  of  T.  C.  Murray  this  parental 
tyranny  is  made  the  central  theme,  though  in  different  aspects. 
In  Birthright  Bat  Morrissey,  the  typical  hard,  grubbing  farmer 
of  the  new  plays,  rails  against  even  the  priest  who  has  en- 
couraged young  Hugh  Morrissey  in  his  hurly  playing.  "Destroy- 
ing the  parish  he  is  since  he  came  into  it,  taking  people  away 
from  their  work  and  putting  notions  into  their  heads."  Be- 
cause he,  like  Murtagh  Cosgar,  Tom  Carragher,  Dan  Fogarty, 

Mrs.  Grogan,  and  the  other  well-to-do  peasants,  loves  his 
land  more  than  anything  else,  he  decides  to  ship  open  faced 
and  open-hearted  Hugh,  popular  for  his  hurly  prowess  and  verse 
making,  off  to  America  and  leave  the  farm  to  Shane,  the  younger 
son,  who  is  careful  and  plodding,  with  no  wider  ambition  than 


, 

' 

* 


-61- 


healthy  3tock  and  plentiful  crops.  Thus  is  the  old  tragedy 
of  Cain  precipitated,  for  according  to  all  the  customs  the 
birthright  was  Hugh's. 

The  situation  is  no  less  tragic  in  Maurice  Harte.  a 
little  two-act  play  which  probably  goes  deeper  into  the  life 
of  the  Cork  peasant  than  any  of  the  National  plays  do;  which, 
although  not  so  sparklingly  clever  as  the  earlier  plays,  has 
a high  degree  of  hearthside  sublimity.  The  Hartes  like  many 
another  Irish  family  have  sacrificed  almost  to  the  point  of 
bankruptcy  in  order  that  they  may  prepare  Maurice  for  the 
priesthood.  Mrs.  Harte  speaks  for  all  Irish  Catholic  mothers 
when  she  says:  "I'm  a strong  healthy  woman,  with  a healthy 
woman's  appetite,  and  yet  I could  live  for  the  rest  of  my  days 
on  a bit  o'  bread  and  a sup  o'  sour  milk  for  the  wonderful 
joy  that  comes  rushing  down  on  me  night  and  day,  and  I thinking 
of  him  a priest  of  God."  Maurice  Harte  differs  from  the 
plays  already  studied  in  that  the  Harte  men  are  far  more  lovable 
than  the  majority  of  peasant  characters.  Owen  and  Michael, 
while  "grubbing  farmers"  yet  have  more  tolerance  and  are  more 
disposed  to  be  easy  upon  Maurice  than  is  his  mother  who  cries 
in  the  intensity  of  her  disappointment:  "And  will  you  have  no 
pity  at  all  on  us  and  on  07/en  here,  that  have  slaved  for  you 
all  our  lives?  Will  you  be  talking  wild,  frightening,  foolish 
talk  about  your  conscience,  and  not  think  at  all  of  them,  nor 
of  us,  and  all  we  done  for  you?"  Finally  her  will  prevails 


. 


* 


J 


-62- 


and  the  wretched  young  man  promises  to  keep  on  with  his  pre- 
paration. In  this  as  in  most  other  modern  plays  where  the 
rights  of  an  individual  are  sacrificed  to  a clannish  family 
system,  the  result  is  tragic  for  all  concerned.  It  should  be 
mentioned  in  passing  that  from  a standpoint  of  dialect  Maurice 
Hart e_  is  almost  as  rich  as  some  of  the  plays  of  the  National 
group.  In  the  homely  chatter  of  Mrs.  O’Connor  and  Mrs.  Harte 
at  the  beginning  of  the  play  there  is  a good  deal  of  Celtic 
lyricism  in  spite  of  its  grip  on  the  things  of  ordinary  life. 

In  only  three  other  plays  does  the  mother  use  her 
influence  to  keep  youth  from  doing  what  it  feels  it  should  do. 
Mrs.  Clancy,  because  she  has  always  ruled  her  son,  body  and 
soul,  is  able  to  stay  him  from  the  confession  which  is  the 
only  relief  possible  to  his  over-wrought  soul.  She  is  a type 
of  the  hard  and  grasping  peasant  who  has  so  idolized  name  and 
property  that  her  first  cry  at  the  news  of  her  son's  crime  is, 
"May  God  pity  me,  what  did  I ever  do  to  deserve  this.  My  son 
a murderer  and  the  Clancy  name  disgraced.  Oh,  Holy  Virgin, 
have  pity  on  me... I 'll  never  be  able  to  look  the  neighbors  in 
the  face  again." 

In  two  of  Ervine's  plays  the  mother  weakens  and  at- 
temps  to  interpose  duty  to  the  family  against  the  child's 
conception  of  duty  to  himself.  In  her  extremity  Mrs.  Ferguson 
pleads:  "I  don't  want  God's  will'.  I want  my  son!  It's 

nothing  to  me  what  he  done— he's  my  son'.  I don't  care  if  he 


' 


- 


1 


. 


. 


. 


-63- 


killed  a hundred  men — he's  my  son!  I'll  not  let  him  go  to 
Jail — It's  not  right  to  be  sending  him  away  like  that.  He's 
my  only  son,  and  I'm  an  old  woman.  You  had  no  call  to  be 
sending  him  away."  In  The  Magnanimous  Lover  it  is  Maggie 
Cather's  mother,  rather  than  her  father,  who  tries  to  force 
her  into  the  marriage  from  which  she  recoils  "with  hot  anger 
in  her  heart  at  the  injustice  of  the  world  and  at  the  'unco' 
guidness ' of  her  old  time  lover,  Henry  Hinde."^ 

Still  another  characteristic  common  to  most  of  the 
peasants  of  the  new  plays  is  the  lack  of  the  romantic  element. 
The  attention  which  has  been  called  to  the  loyal  and  sturdily 
independent  love  of  Hugh  Rainey,  Matt  Cosgar,  and  Robbie  John 
Granahan  must  not  give  an  incorrent  impression  of  the  attitude 
of  the  Irish  peasant  toward  romantic  love.  The  characteristic 
attitude  of  all  the  older  people  and  most  of  the  younger  is  in 
the  position  of  Rainey  and  Murtagh  Cosgar  and  the  Granahans . 
Even  the  gentle  Fergusons  are  willing  to  force  Hannah  to  marry 
the  contemptible  Jimmy  Caesar  in  order  to  save  the  farm.  And 
the  whole  feeling  of  the  typical  peasant  about  romance  is  ex- 
pressed, curiously  enough,  by  Mrs . Ferguson,  who  herself 
married  for  love.  "She's  a young  slip  of  a girl  with  wayward 
fancies  in  her  head,  mebbe,  but  Jimmy's  as  good  and  substantial 
a man  as  she's  likely  to  get,  and  he'll  be  a good  husband  to 
her.  It's  a great  thing  for  a girl  to  get  a comfortable  home 


1 * Irish  Plays  and  Playwrights,  p . 245 . 


. 


, 

■ 

' 

# 

• 

-64- 


to  go  to  when  she  leaves  the  one  she  was  reared  in.  There's 
plenty  of  young  women  does  be  running  after  this  and  running- 
after  that,  but  sure  there's  nothing  in  the  end  to  beat  a kind 
man  and  a good  home  where  the  money  is  easy  and  regular." 

This  unromantic  atmosphere  permeate  practically  all 
of  the  plays.  Mrs.  Clancy  bargains  as  shrewdly  for  a wife 
for  her  son  as  she  would  over  the  purchase  of  a new  colt. 

John  Murray  in  The  Drone  proposes  to  shrewish  and  unattractive 
Sarah  McMinn  simply  because  he  feels  it  will  be  money  in  his 
pocket  to  have  a woman  who  will  stop  the  waste  in  his  home. 

And  when  he  is  threatened  with  the  breach  of  promise  suit,  he 
says  grimly,  "I'd  as  soon  do  without  the  marrying  if  I could. 

I don't  want  the  woman  at  all,  but  I'll  marry  her  before  she 
gets  a ha'penny  off  me."  Ellen  McCarthy  allows  herself  to  be 
plighted  to  Tom  Dempsey  in  spite  of  her  affection  for  her 
Dublin  lover,  because  as  she  says  prudently,  "Now  that  I've 
the  chance  of  being  mistress  of  a big  farm — -well,  it’s  a great 
opportunity."  Sentimental  Julia  Shea's  life  is  made  miserable 
for  her  in  The  Country  Dressmaker  by  relatives  who  nag  her  into 
marriage  as  the  best  method  of  keeping  her  mother  out  of  the 
poor-house  and  giving  her  a decent  burial.  In  The  Mineral 
Workers  when  all  other  schemes  fail  to  win  over  coarse,  bump- 
tious old  Dan  Fogarty,  the  Mulroys  come  round  him  by  offering 
to  him  Kitty,  the  pretty  daughter  of  the  family.  In  general 
it  may  safely  be  said  that  romance  in  any  except  very  young 


. 


■ 


. 

■ 

, 

. 

■ 


-65- 


people  is  practically  non-existent  in  these  plays. 

It  is  significant  that,  with  the  single  exception  of 
The  Magnanimous  Lover,  in  every  case  where  the  play  proceeds 
along  unromantic  lines,  the  underlying  cause  is  love  of  the 
land  and  a blind  belief  in  the  land  as  the  source  of  all  pos- 
sible happiness  for  Irish  people.  The  past  centuries  of 
landlord  oppression,  of  bitter,  unremitting  struggle  for  the 
possession  of  the  land,  of  dumbly  laborious  efforts  to  build 
up  a prosperous  farm,  seem  to  have  entered  the  soul  of  the 
present  day  peasant  to  make  the  land  hi3  guiding  passion. 

Shaw’s  John  Bull's  Other  Island  hints  at  such  a theme  in  the 
scorn  of  the  returned  Irishman  for  the  grubbing  virtue  of  a 
peasant  who  has  given  his  life  to  reclaim  an  acre  of  waste  land. 
Colum  more  than  hints  at  it  in  a meaningful  passage  in  The  Land . 

Murtagh  Cosgar:  Ah  but  that's  the  sight  to 

fill  one's  heart.  Lands  ploughed 
and  spread.  And  all  our  own; 
all  our  own . 

Martin  Douras : Ay.  All  our  own.  But  we  made 

a hard  fight  for  them. 

Murtagh  Cosgar:  Them  that  come  after  us  will  never 

see  them  as  we  are  seeing  them. 

Them  that  come  after  us.  Isn't 
that  a great  thought,  Martin  Douras? 

And  isn't  it  a great  thing  that  we're 
able  to  pass  this  land  on  to  them, 
and  it  redeemed  forever?  Ay,  and. 
their  manhood  spared  the  shame  that 
our  manhood  knew . Standing  in  the 
rain  with  our  hats  off  to  let  a 
landlord- — ay,  or  a landlord's  dog-boy, 
pass  the  way . 


' 


, 


■ 


. 


' 


-66- 


The  tragedy  of  life  for  this  type  of  peasant  is  in 
Martin  Douras's  reply,  "Ay,  but  the  young  are  going  fast;  the 
young  are  going  fast."  In  only  two  plays  are  there  excep- 
tions to  his  generalization.  It  is  the  daughters  of  Conn 
Hourican  in  The  Fiddler's  House  who  wish  to  settle  into  their 
own  cottage  and  possess  their  own  bit  of  land;  in  a very  recent 
play*  Clan  Falvev  by  Daniel  Corkery,  Sean  O'Falvey  sits  by  the 
fireside  reading  old  stories  of  the  pride  of  his  ancient  name, 
while  his  son  Hugh  is  out  struggling  feverishly  to  save  the 
crop  from  destruction  by  a threatening  flood.  But  these  are 
exceptional  cases.  If  the  realists  are  interpreting  aright 
the  new  Irish  peasant,  the  striplings  now  in  their  youth  will 
never  be  able  to  say  with  old-fashioned  Ned  Mulroy:  "I'm  an 
old  man,  brought  up  on  the  land — it's  like  a mother's  face  to 
me.  I never  cared  for  anything  but  land,  and  when  I thought 
it  was  my  own,  I kissed  it  with  the  two  lips  of  my  heart . Oh 
Cod  in  heaven,  more  than  life  I worshipped  it." 

It  should  be  noticed  that  this  very  closeness  to 
primitive  life  which  in  the  National  school  produced  characters 
of  the  highest  imaginativeness  is  probably  at  the  root  of  the 
prosiness  which  the  realists  feel  to  be  another  characteristic 
of  the  peasant.  Such  a basic  difference  in  characterization 
may  be  shown  by  contrasting  parallel  passages  from  plays  of  the 
two  schools,  and  by  showing  the  difference  both  in  degree  of 
lyric  expression  and  in  cause  animating  it,  in  the  comparatively 


* 


. 


. 


. 


. 


-67- 


rare  moments  when  the  peasant  of  the  new  genre  rises  from  his 
usual  unheroic  level. 

In  all  the  early  scenes  of  John  Ferguson  Jimmy  Caesar, 
one  sees  if  one  stops  to  think  about  it,  is  not  much  less  than 
a prosaic  Christy  Mahon,  always  dreaming  of  the  great  deeds  he 
is  going  to  do  but  at  heart  timid  and  cowardly.  The  contrast 
between  the  old  and  the  new  peasant  is  strikingly  noticeable 
in  the  way  these  two  men  are  handled.  Christy  is  a delight- 
ful, rich  figure  in  spite  of  his  cowardice  and  egoism,  and  in 
the  end  discovers  himself,  but  Jimmy  remains  "a  collie”  to  the 
end.  He  is,  moreover,  denied  the  rhythmic,  imaginative  speech 
which  would  make  him  attractive  as  Christy  is.  He  must  all 
his  life  mourn  dully,  ”I'm  always  imagining  myself  doing  brave 
things  and  seeing  people  clapping  me  and  making  speeches  about 
me,  and  printing  things  in  the  paper  because  of  my  greatness 
and  gallantry;  but  if  a cow  was  to  make  a run  at  me  in  the 
fields,  I'd  be  near  scared  to  death  of  it.” 

Another  contrast  showing  the  prosiness  of  the  modern 
peasant  may  be  seen  by  placing  the  love-making  of  Hugh  Rainey 
against  that  of  Christy  Mahon.  Now,  Hugh's  and  Nora's  love 
is  as  passionate  as  Christy's  and  Pegeen'3,  and  a great  deal 
deeper.  But  the  language  is  no  richer  than  an  everyday 
peasant  under  the  stress  of  a powerful  emotion  might  be  expected 
to  use.  "It's  a quare  fine  thing  t'  be  in  love  wi ' you,  Nora. 


Sometimes  whin  A'm  think  in'  about  it  A can’t  onder stand  it. 


* 


■ 

• 

. 

' 

-68- 


A'm  just  like  a man  wi 1 somethin'  inside  him  that  wants  t' 
come  out,  and  can't  fin'  the  way.  Ye  know  what  A mane,  don't 
ye?  A want  til  tell  ye,  but  A don't  know  how,  an'  a just 
stan'  still  wi ' me  tongue  clackin'  in  me  mouth  like  a dumb 
man's.  A want  til  tell  iv'rybuddy  A 'm  in  love  wi'  ye,  an' 
goin'  t'  marry  ye.  A feel  prouder  nor  the  King  o'  Eng lan ' 
or  the  Mayor  o'  Belfast."  There  is  a world  of  real  emotion 
in  those  lines,  but  emotion  stammeringly,  lamely,  prosily 
expressed,  if  one  compares  it  to  Christy's  well-known:  "It's 
little  you'll  think  if  my  love's  a poacher's  or  an  earl's  it- 
self, when  you'll  feel  my  two  hands  stretched  around  you  and 
I squeezing  kisses  on  your  puckered  lips  till  I feel  a kind  of 
pity  for  the  Lord  God  in  all  ages  sitting  lonesome  in  his 
golden  chair." 

Nora's  love  for  Hugh  is  far  more  sincere  than  Pegeen's 
but  she  can  only  say,  "Aw  my  man,  A cudden  let  ye  go.  A'd 
houd  on  til  ye  if  the  wurl ' was  til  fall  in  anondher  our  feet 
if  A didden  let  go."  Pegeen,  "the  fright  of  seven  townlands 
for  her  biting  tongue,"  exclaims  radiantly,  "I'll  be  burning 
candles  from  this  out  to  the  miracles  of  God  that  have  brought 
you  from  the  south  to-day,  and  I with  my  gowns  bought  ready, 
the  way  I can  wed  you,  and  not  wait  at  all." 

Two  other  parallel  passages  may  be  mentioned  as  es- 
pecially significant.  Myles  Gorman,  in  Thomas  Muskerrv  is  a 
blind  old  pauper  who  goes  back  to  the  wild  free  life  of  wander- 


. r 

. t ■ . ' ^ 


■ 

. 


-69- 


ing  with  the  same  relief  as  do  Martin  and  Mary  Doul  in  The 
Well  of  the  Saint . Myles  and  Martin  have  lived  the  same  sort 
of  lives;  Thomas  Muskerry's  description  of  Myles  Gorman: 

"You  feel  he  has  the  life  of  a young  colt  and  then  you're  bound 
to  think  that  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  he's  blind  and  a wan- 
derer, the  man  has  not  wasted  his  life"  applies  fully  as  well 
to  Martin  and  Mary.  Gorman's  speech  is  more  lyrical  than  that 
of  most  of  the  characters  in  the  realistic  plays,  but  is  sober 
and  commonplace  in  comparison  with  Martin  Doul's  joy  in  "hearing 
a soft  wind  turning  around  the  little  leaves  of  the  spring  and 
feeling  the  sun,  and  we  not  tormenting  our  souls  with  the  sight 
of  gray  days,  and  the  holy  men,  and  the  dirty  feet  is  trampling 
the  world."  Colum's  blind  old  wanderer  only  longs  "to  be  out 
in  the  day  and  to  feel  the  throng  moving  about,  and  to  be  talk- 
ing to  the  men  that  do  be  on  the  road." 

Even  the  peasants  whose  sensibilities  are  not  dulled 
by  unceasing  manual  toil  are  prosaic.  Denis  Geoghegan,  Daniel 
Murray  and  the  Donnelly  men  are  certainly  not  open  to  the 
charge  of  industry  in  any  form;  all  of  them  have  been  "spoiled" 
by  indulgent  relatives  until  whatever  "grubbing  morality"  they 
may  have  had  is  ocmpletely  dissipated.  Ne'er-do-wells  to  the 
end,  all  of  them,  and  yet,  there  is  not  a single  poetic  speech 
from  one  of  them.  Uncle  Daniel  Murray  in  The  Drone  is  toler- 
able only  because  of  the  contrast  he  affords  to  his  hard, 
grasping  environment,  but  he  never  kindles  the  imagination. 


' 


. 


-70- 


Dominic  Donnelly  is  downright  contemptible  as  he  sits  in  his 
easy  chair,  peacefully  contemplating  the  sale  of  the  family's 
last  half -starved  cow:  "The  cow's  a dreadful  bother — wanting 
something  always.  When  she's  not  dry  she's  hungry — I wonder 
how  we  put  up  with  her  so  long.  That's  God's  truth.  Better 
you'll  be  without  her,  and  the  worry  of  having  to  milk  her." 

Now  this  is  essentially  Martin  Doul 's  philosophy  of  life  as  he 
rejects  the  hardships  of  normal  life  for  the  entrancing  existence 
which  can  involve  no  effort  of  disillusion.  But  what  a dif- 
ference in  the  reaction  of  the  two  characters  upon  the  reader'. 
Dominic  Donnelly  is  a commonplace,  worthless  trifler — Martin 
Doul  is  a human  soul  rejecting  actuality  for  the  life  of  the 
imagination.  The  life  of  one  is  prose;  of  the  other,  poetry. 

This  prosiness,  this  lack  of  lyric  impulse,  this 
failure  to  be  exalted  and  powerfully  moved  by  the  beauties  of 
Nature  is  to  the  realists  a central  characteristic  of  the  Irish 
peasant  , In  the  unusual  moments  when  he  is  moved  to  expression 
richer  and  more  beautiful  than  is  to  be  found  in  the  ordinary 
speech  of  any  countryman,  the  cause  is  always  some  human  re- 
lation rather  than  the  intense  appreciation  of  Nature  which 
stirred  the  national  school  peasant  . In  all  of  this  the  new 

dramatists  are  faithfully  realistic.  People  of  the  soil  are 

comparatively  matter-of-fact  and  unimaginative;  years  of  purely 
physical  toil  deaden  the  aesthetic  sensibilities  of  any  one. 
Narrow  vocabularies  ordinarily  mean  narrow  range  of  thought . 


' 


-71- 


With  its  muscle-straining  combat  with  the  forces  of  hostile 
Nature,  primitive  life,  unfortunately,  tends  to  repress  human 
imagination — in  real  life.  But  the  basic,  fundamental  emotion 
of  life  which  stirs  even  the  most  prosaic  men  to  some  degree 
of  lyric  expression  is,  as  the  Irish  realists  insist,  human 
relation— the  wail  of  Grandfather  Granahan  when  Robbie  John 
falls  a victim  to  his  father's  hardness;  the  passion  of  Michael 
O'Hara  "to  see  the  streets  full  o'  happy  men  and  weemen  again, 
their  faces  shinin'  wi ' the  glory  o'  the  Lord  God,  an'  the 
childher  runnin'  about  in  the  sun  and  none  o'  them  sick  wi ' 
hunger;"  the  maternal  sacrifice  of  Moll  Woods,  the  Shuiler; 
the  emotional  stress  of  Maurice  Harte  who  is  forced  by  his 
family  to  what  he  considers  sacrilege;  the  patriotic  fervor 
of  James  Nugent . 

In  conclusion,  a statement  of  Yeats  indicating  the 
tendency  of  the  young  realists,  then  in  1907  just  beginning  to 
write,  is  arresting  for  its  almost  uncanny  perception  that  a 
new  peasant  genre  was  upon  the  horizon.  "The  people  they 
write  of  are  not  the  true  folk.  They  are  the  peasant  as  he 
is  being  transformed  by  modern  life,  and  for  that  very  reason 
the  man  of  the  towns  may  find  it  easier  to  understand  them. 
There  is  less  surprise,  less  wonder  in  what  he  sees,  but  there 
is  more  of  himself  there,  more  of  his  vision  of  the  world  and 
of  the  problems  that  are  troubling  him."^ 


1.  Collected  Work3.  Vol . IV.,  p.  187. 


-72- 


CHAPTER  IV. 

THE  FALLACY  OF  "REGIONAL  REALISM" . 

It  has  been  the  tendency  of  most  of  the  critics  who 
have  studied  the  new  Irish  drama  to  insist  that  the  realism 
which  is  so  pronounced  in  the  recent  plays  is  "regional”.  By 
the  term  they  imply  that  each  playwright  is  concerned  only 
with  the  life  of  the  particular  section  of  country  in  which 
he  lives,  and  hence  that  his  reading  of  life  is  necessarily 
different  from  that  of  the  dramatists  who  write  of  other  prov- 
inces . Weygandt  expresses  the  idea  in  an  important  intro- 
ductory chapter  of  Irish  Plays  and  Playwrights.  "The  new 
Irish  drama  is  more  native  in  its  stories  than  is  the  Elizabeth- 
an drama,  as  these  stories,  even  when  they  are  stories  found 
in  variant  forms  in  other  countries,  are  given  the  tone  of 
Irish  life.  Synge,  the  master  dramatist  of  the  new  movement, 
while  he  does  not  reproduce  the  average  Irishman,  is  just  as 
natively  Irish  in  his  extravagance  and  irony  as  the  old  folk- 
tale of  the  "Two  Hags";  Lady  Gregory  in  her  farces  is  in  a 
similar  way  representative  of  the  riot  of  West  country  imagina- 
tion; and  Mr.  Yeats,  if  farther  removed  from  the  irishmen  of 
to-day,  is  very  life,  in  many  of  his  moods  to  the  riddling 
bards  of  long  ago.  The  later  men,  many  of  them,  are  altogether 


Irish,  representative  of  the  folk  of  one  or  another  section 


' 


f-tfo 


-73- 


of  the  country,  Mr.  Murray  and  Mr.  Robin son  of  Cork t Mr . Mayne 
and  Mr . Ervine  of  Down,  Mr.  Colum  and  Mr.  Boyle  of  the  Mid - 
lands  . 

Other  critics  almost  invariably  use  the  word  or  the 
idea  "regional"  in  speaking  of  individual  playwrights.  Charles 
Tennyson,  for  instance,  says:  "Mr.  Colum  writes  of  central 
Ireland;  and  the  passion  and  richness  of  the  west  find  no  place 
in  his  work.  None  the  less  it  has  a pronounced  imaginative 
flavor  and  a fineness  of  vision  which  give  distinction  to  his 
closely  studied  characters.  The  later  realists  have  come 
from  the  north,  east  and  south — Colum  the  middle  dramatist  forms 
a link  with  'the  naked  sea-bitten  provinces  of  the  West  where 
life  is  still  simple  and  speech  harmonious.'"  In  the  same 
strain  Lloyd  Morris  says  of  Lennox  Robinson,  "He,  too,  is  a 
regional  playwright — it  is  of  the  southwest  that  he  writes;" 
and  of  Maurice  Harte.  "It  does  for  Catholic  Ireland  just  what 
the  plays  of  'Rutherford  Mayne'  and  St.  John  Ervine  do  for 
Protestant  Ireland."^ 

This  stock  criticism  of  "regional  realism"  has  arisen 
from  a number  of  causes.  One  of  the  lesser  reasons,  no  doubt, 
is  that  in  attributing  reality  and  "Irish-ness"  of  any  degree 


1.  P.  14. 

2.  Quarterly  Review.  Vol . 215,  pp . 219-241. 

3 . Celtic  Dawn,  p . 151 . 


-74- 


it  is  always  necessary  to  emphasize  their  locale  as  the  West 
Coast  and  the  bog-lands  of  County  Wicklow  where  life  is  primi- 
tive and  isolated,  and  the  peasant,  comparatively  untouched  by 
civilization,  retains  his  Celtic  extravagance  and  grotesquerie . 
It  is  natural  that  the  same  method  of  criticism  should  be  car- 
ried over  into  discussion  of  later  playwrights  . 

Another,  and  much  more  powerful  cause,  is  in  the 
general  feeling  that  the  North  is  entirely  apart  from  the  rest 
of  Ireland.  Ulster  has  for  a long  time  seemed  almost  a foreign 
country  in  her  relations  with  Connacht,  Leinster,  and  Munster. 
The  reason  is  not  far  to  seek : the  Scotch  Presbyterian  colonies 
which  were  "planted"  in  Ulster  in  the  seventeenth  and  succeed- 
ing centuries  have  retained  their  racial  and  religious  char- 
acteristics as  the  foreigners  who  invaded  other  parts  of  Ireland 
did  not.  Moreover,  Ulster  is  an  industrial  province;  her 
factories  and  shops  and  trade-unions  are  in  striking  contrast 
to  the  fields  and  dairies  and  peasant  population  of  the  south 
and  west.  Naturally,  critics  reason,  a drama  which  is  true  of 
North  Irish  life  will  have  little  in  common  with  that  of  the 
rest  of  the  country. 

Another  factor  in  producing  this  insistence  upon  the 
unlikeness  of  the  North  Irish  drama  to  that  of  the  Abbey  Theatre 
tradition  may  very  likely  be  the  attitude  of  Uladh,  the  official 
publication  of  the  Ulster  Literary  Theatre  which  was  established 
in  1904  with  the  avowed  purpose  of  fostering  a drama  which 


I 


-75- 


should  be  native  to  Ulster.  A typical  editorial  of  this  little 
periodical  is  in  the  Samhain  number,  November  1904 1 "We  recog- 
nize at  the  outset  that  our  art  of  the  drama  will  be  different 
from  that  other  Irish  art  of  drama  from  the  stage  of  the  Irish 
National  Theatre  in  Dublin,  where  two  men,  W.  B.  Yeats  and 
Douglas  Hyde,  have  set  a model  in  Anglo-Irish  and  Gaelic  plays 
with  a success  that  is  surprising  and  exhilarating.  Dreamer, 
mystic,  symbolist,  Gaelic  poet  and  propagandist  have  all  spoken 
on  the  Dublin  stage,  and  a fairly  defined  local  school  has  been 
inaugurated.  We  in  Belfast  and  Ulster  also  wish  to  set  up  a 
school;  but  there  will  be  a difference.  At  present  we  can 
only  say  that  our  talent  is  more  satiric  than  poetic  . That 
will  probably  remain  the  broad  difference  between  the  Ulster  and 
the  Leinster  schools.”  In  1904  this  statement  was  reasonable 
enough.  Even  the  semi-realistic  peasant  plays  of  Synge  and 
Lady  Gregory  were  very  new  in  Dublin,  their  significance  as 
turning  points  away  from  the  poetic  drama  of  legendary  and  folk 
life  only  half  realized  by  Yeats  himself  . Robinson,  Murray, 
Boyle,  Seumas  O'Kelly,  and  George  Fitzmaurice  had  not  yet  begun 
to  write  their  biting  studies  of  the  contemporary  peasant. 

By  1915,  however,  as  we  have  seen,  the  plays  of  the  Abbey 
dramatists  were  as  deeply  realistic  and  as  satiric  as  those 
of  the  Belfast  group . Hence  the  critical  dicta  of  those 
early  numbers  of  Uladh  are  to  be  viewed  to-day  with  a good 
deal  of  skepticism. 


. 


-76- 


Finally,  the  distinct  difference  in  dialect  in  the 
plays  from  different  parts  of  the  countries  has  helped  to 
lead  observers  to  regard  the  drama  of  the  North  almost  as  form- 
ing a separate  school;  has  no  doubt  influenced  writers  like 
E.  A.  Boyd  to  isolate  the  plays  of  North  Ireland  from  those 
of  the  other  provinces.  The  language  of  the  Ulster  plays, 
with  the  exception  of  Ervine's  which  by  its  intensification 
and  literal  transcription  seems  something  entirely  new,  has 
a strong  resemblance  to  the  staple  "Irish  dialect"  which  budding 
American  story -writers  put  into  the  mouths  of  their  Pats  and 
Mikes  . The  speech  of  the  southern  peasants  is  patterned 
after  Synge's  Kiltartanese  . To  make  the  contrast  clear  pas- 
sages may  be  cited  from  the  two  authors  showing  the  most  in- 
dividual use  of  unlike  dialects,  Ervine  and  Fitzmaurice. 

Here  is  a characteristic  speech  from  Mixed  Marriage: 
Mrs.  Rainey:  "Me  an'  my  me.n  has  had  our  ups  and  downs,  an'  he's 
a bit  domineerin',  but  A think  A'd  do  it  again  if  A had  me 
life  over  again.  They  don't  ondherstan'  weemen . . .but  ye  git 
to  ondherstan'  them  soon  enough.  Ye  know,  they're  quare  oul' 
humbugs  when  ye  know  them.  Och,  dear,  the 're  jus'  like  big 
childher . When  Hughie  wus  a chile,  he  wus  quare  an'  strong. 
There  wus  times  afore  he  cud  walk  whin  A cud  har'ly  houl ' him, 
he  wud  twist  about  in  me  arms  that  much...  It  was  sore  work 
sometimes,  an'  his  da  nivir  seemed  to  ondherstan'  that  A got 


tired  out . " 


* 


' 


-77- 


The  two  following  short  speeches  quoted  to  show  the 
dialectal  method  of  Fitzmaurice  are  from  the  last  scene  of 
The  Country  Dressmaker: 

Matt:  It's  a lonesome  evening  you  will  have  of 

it  surely.  But  if  I overtake  the  ruffian, 
Clohesy,  it's  a welt  for  a welt  I'll  get 
or  call  me  a coward  and  a shame  to  my  clan 
for  the  rest  of  my  days." 

Norry : You  have  your  will  now.  You  have  your 

will  . The  dark  house  behind  in  Lyre  will 
be  our  doom.  Tisn't  the  friends  and 
neighbors  will  be  about  us  in  our  latter 
end  and  we  drawing  the  last  breath,  but 
it's  in  a cold  place  we'll  be  among 
strangers.  A plain  coffin  they'll  make 
for  us  and  there  will  be  no  thought  of 
us  at  all  and  we  going  to  our  long  home  . 

You  have  your  will  now. 

No  nice  discrimination  is  required  to  see  the  dif- 
ference in  the  two  uses  of  dialect  just  quoted.  It  is  there 
in  too  bald  outlines  to  be  missed  by  anyone  . What  is  not  so 
easily  noticed,  however,  is  the  very  distinct  differences  be- 
tween the  dialects  of  plays  dealing  with  the  same  part  of  the 
country  . Mayne,  of  whose  plays  Boyd  says,  "The  speech,  setting 
and  acting  combine  to  impress  upon  the  spectator  the  peculiar 
character  of  the  Ulsterman  and  his  environment,""*"  uses  a di- 
alect which  is  remarkably  flexible  . The  outraged  words  of 
Mrs.  Granahan  upon  the  bargaining  of  William  John  sound  very 
like  Ervine:  "Fine  hunnert  houn',  and  after  me  tellin'  him 
to  keep  til  four  hunnert.  Wail  til  I git  ahoult  of  him  again. 


1 • Contemporary  Drama  of  Ireland , p . 1 78 . 


-78- 

I 1 11  speak  til  him.  Did  he  no  hear  me  thumpin'  four  times 
on  the  door  til  remind  him?"1  But  the  well-known  last  speech 
of  Grandfather  Granahan  in  the  same  play  is  of  another  sort: 
"D'ye  think  them  proud  city  folk  will  listen  to  his  poor  ould 
ballads  with  the  heart  of  the  boy  singing  through  them?  It's 
only  us — it's  only  us,  I say,  as  knows  the  long  wild  nights 
and  the  wet  and  the  rain  and  the  mists  of  nights  on  the  bog- 
lands — it’s  only  us,  I say,  could  listen  to  him  in  the  right 
way . And  ye  knowed,  right  well  ye  knowed,  that  every  string  of 
his  fiddle  was  keyed  to  the  crying  of  your  own  heart."  This 
might  have  been  written  by  Fitzmaurice  or  Murray — or  even  by 
Synge.  If  it  expresses  the  North  it  is  not  far  off  the  mark 
of  the  South  and  the  West  . 

A similar  study  of  the  dialect  employed  by  Fitzmaurice 
and  Murray,  who  are  in  every  way  the  masters  of  Leinster  speech, 
would  reveal  as  striking  differences.  The  passage  from  The 
Country  Dressmaker  quoted  in  a recent  paragraph  is  not  so  dif- 
ferent from  Murray,  but  the  words  and  the  tumbling  rhythms  of 
many  other  typical  speeches  of  Fitzmaurice  are  no  more  like 
Murray  and  Robinson  than  Ervine . A speech  selected  almost 
at  random  from  The  Pie-Dish  illustrates  the  difference:  "Isn't 
that  queer  for  you,  black  Mage,  and  you  knowing  our  sow  has 
bonnives,  a big  straak  of  hay  down  on  us  and  the  servant  girl 


1 • The  Turn  of  the  Road . 


' 


. 


-79- 


after  hoisting  her  sails?  Is  there  no  credit  due  to  me  to 
be  endangering  my  life  coming  here  this  roasting  day,  and  he 
no  loss  in  course,  the  poor  old  man,  in  comparison  with  me  or 
the  likes  of  me,  the  mother  of  a huge  family?” 

Robinson’s  language  in  The  Clancy  Name  and  The  White- 
headed  Boy  differs  no  more  from  Mayne’s  than  from  that  of  his 
fellow  Dubliners.  Indeed  there  is  a notable  dialectal  dif- 
ference in  the  two  plays  themselves.  A passage  typical  of 
Robinson’s  early  use  of  the  peasant  speech  may  be  quoted  from 
The  Clancy  Name . 

Eugene:  I always  say  that  the  day  James  Clancy 
died  wasn't  the  worst  day  for  his 
widow . 

Mrs.  Spillane:  You’re  right,  Eugene,  though 

it’s  a hard  thing  to  be  saying  in  this 
house . Poor  James  Clancy — God  rest 
his  soul l — a kind  man,  and  a good 
man,  but  not  much  of  a man  on  a farm. 

Eugene:  Not  much  indeed,  but  a nice  little  ball 
of  a man  and  a Clancy  every  inch  of  him. 

Mrs.  Spillane:  Herself ’s  more  of  a Clancy  if 

you  ask  me . What  with  pride  and  man- 
agement , and  good  farming — 't isn't  every 
woman  would  battle  it  out  the  way  she 
did — and  I'm  thinking  Eugene,  if  we’d 
asked  a bigger  interest  of  her  we'd 
have  got  it . 

Eugene:  Ah  well,  well,  you  wouldn't  be  hard  on 
a neighbor  in  trouble;  and  she  was  a 
stiff  one  to  drive  a bargain  with. 

Maybe  you  don't  remember  the  day  and 
she  dressed  in  black  and  her  hands 
trembling  with  the  fear  of  the  farm 
being  sold  over  her  head,  and  for  all 
her  fears,  and  for  all  her  black, 
divil  a bit  would  she  give  us  only 
f ive  per  cent . 


- 9 


-80- 


Mrs . Spillane:  Sure  I remember.  Well,  indeed, 

I don’t  grudge  it  to  her,  her  farm  is 
a credit  to  the  parish. 

The  following  passage  from  The  White-headed  Boy  is 
Robinson  in  another  mood.  One  could  never  mistake  the  dialogue 
here  for  Murray  or  Fitzmaurice. 

George:  I won’t  have  an  easy  minute  till  the 

pair  of  them  are  married  and  gone . Oh 
Donough,  it's  an  awful  thing  to  be  head 
of  a family.  Since  the  father  died 
I’ve  not  had  a minute’s  rest,  pulled 
this  way  and  that  way,  this  one  wanting 
to  get  married,  another  going  into 
business,  Baby  flying  up  to  Dublin, 

Denis  doctoring — many  a time  I wished 
I was  born  an  orphan . 

Aunt  Ellen:  God  forgive  you. 

George:  It's  true.  Aunt  Ellen.  Look  at  the  life 
I've  led  between  you  all,  and  no  one  ever 
thinking  maybe  I'd  want  to  get  married, 
or  have  a bit  of  fun,  or  spend  a bit  of 
money.  For  two  pins  I'd  throw  the  lot 
of  ye  over  to-morrow  and  sail  away  out 
of  this  for  ever. 

Aunt  Ellen:  Yerra,  talk  sense,  George;  that's 
no  way  to  be  behaving. 

George:  There's  no  escape  for  me.  I'm  caught 

like  an  old  cow  with  her  head  in  a stall. 

When  one  turns  to  the  plays  of  the  Midlands  one  finds 
varying  dialects  again.  Colum's  and  Boyle's  use  of  peasant 
speech  are  greatly  unlike  in  both  words  and  rhythms.  Do  not 
the  two  following  passages,  the  first  from  The  Fiddler '3  House 
and  the  second  from  The  Family  Failing,  show  a striking  contrast 
of  language? 


-81- 


Conn:  God  help  them  that  are  depending  on  the 

land  and  the  weather  for  the  bit  they  put 
into  their  heads.  It's  no  wonder  that 
the  people  here  are  the  sort  they  are, 
harassed,  anxious  people. 

Anne:  The  people  here  mind  their  own  business 
and  they're  a friendly  people  besides. 

Conn:  People  that  would  leave  the  best  fiddler 
at  the  fair  to  go  look  at  a bullock. 

Anne:  He's  not  satisfied  to  have  this  shelter, 

Brian . 

Conn:  (to  Brian)  It's  small  blame  to  the  girl 

here  for  thinking  something  of  the  place; 
but  I saw  the  time,  Brian  MacConnell,  when 
I could  make  more  playing  at  one  fair  than 
working  a whole  season  in  this  bit  of  a 
place  . 

Brian:  Girls  like  the  shelter.  Conn. 

Conn:  Ay,  but  the  road  for  the  fiddler.  I'm 

five  years  settled  here,  and  I come  to  be 
as  well  known  as  the  begging  ass,  and  there 
is  as  much  thought  about  me.  Fiddling, 
let  me  tell  you,  isn't  like  a boy's 
whistling.  It  can't  be  kept  up  on  nothing. 

The  following  is  typical  of  Boyle's  racing  comedy: 

Joe:  There's  something  up'.  They're  running'. 

What  the  dickens  — 

(Nelty  runs  in  breathless.) 

Nelty:  The  cowl  Come  quick',  the  whole  of  you'. 

Maria:  What's  the  matter,  Nelty? 

Nelty:  The  cow'. — in  a bog-hole  drownding.  She 
was  craning,  the  starved  creature,  for  a 
mouthful,  and  the  bank  slipped  in  an -under 
her.  Drownded  she'll  be,  no  less,  if 
yous  don't  hurry. 

Dominic:  After  all  our  effort — Maria,  this  is  terrible 

Nelty:  Isn't  the  Old  Sack  going  to  stir  himself: 


. 


-82- 


Look  alive!  The  devil  pull  you. 

(Drags  Dominic  by  the  arm.)  Up!  Out 
of  this,  you  turf  stack! 

The  fact  would  seem  to  be  that  underneath  all  these 
varying  idioms  and  superficial  dissimilarities  there  is  after 
all  a great  deal  in  common.  The  Irishman  of  to-day  can  per- 
haps be  understood  only  imperfectly  from  the  work  of  any  single 
realist;  he  exists  in  his  full  proportions  as  he  is  drawn  de- 
tail by  detail,  trait  by  trait,  dialect  by  dialect  in  all  of 
the  plays.  Even  the  great  difference  in  dialect  noted  in  the 
Ulster  and  Kerry  plays  of  Ervine  and  Fitzmaurice  is  no  greater 
than  the  difference  in  the  speech  of  a Kentucky  mountaineer 
and  an  Illinois  farmer  who  lives  not  a great  many  miles  distant . 
Yet  we  never  think  of  calling  either  of  these  men  un-American 
or  of  insisting  that  they  are  fundamentally  unlike. 

So  settled,  however,  is  this  feeling  of  the  essential 
uniqueness  of  Ulster  drama  that  Boyd  says  emphatically:  "The 
regionalism  of  the  Northern  dramatists  corresponds  to  a definite 

condition  of  Irish  geography The  Ulster  playwrights  are 

entitled  to  be  considered  apart  from  their  Southern  contempor- 
aries, even  when  they  have  not  been  identified  specifically 
with  the  literary  movement  in  Belfast.  Satirical  humor  seems 
to  be  the  dominant  characteristic  of  the  Ulster  group. n± 
Throughout  the  chapter  whenever  he  has  praise  for  these  northern 
playwrights,  it  is  for  "preserving  the  atmosphere  of  Ulster." 


1.  Contemporary  Drama  of  Ireland,  p.  170. 





-83- 

But  is  the  atmosphere  so  different?  There  is  pure  comedy,  and 
satiric  comedy  in  the  South  and  Midlands  as  well.  Excluding 
The  Building  Fund,  all  of  Boyle's  plays  are  satiric  comedies. 
Robinson's  popular  The  Tffhite -headed  Bov  is  likewise  in  the 
satiric  vein;  The  Country  Dressmaker  and  the  fantasy  Dandy  Dolls 
are  full  of  humorous  satire;  of  all  the  southern  group  only 
Murray  is  entirely  free  from  this  trait  which  has  so  often  been 
ascribed  as  the  outstanding  characteristic  of  the  Ulster  play- 
wrights. On  the  other  hand,  the  Ulster  dramatists  are  not 
without  their  poetry.  Brian  Hobson's  Brian  of  Banba.  James 
Cousin's  Cathleen  Ni  Houlihan.  Lewis  Purcell's  The  Pagan , and 
Joseph  Campbell's  The  Little  Cowherd  of  Slainge  are  by  way  of 
exceptions  to  the  general  realistic  work  of  the  northern  play- 
wrights as  Padraic  Pearse's  plays  of  early  Ireland  and  Fitz- 
maurice's  fantasies  Dandy  Dolls  and  Magic  Glass es  are  to  the 
realism  of  the  Dublin  writers.  And  in  justice  one  must  admit 
that  The  Little  Cowherd  of  Slainge  is  as  truly  in  the  Yeatsian 
tradition  as  are  Pearse's  little  dramatic  dialogues  which  aim 
to  stir  patriotic  feeling — and  a great  deal  more  like  Yeats 
than  are  Dandy  Dolls  and  Magic  Glasses,  which  have  a large 
flavor  of  the  grotesque  because  of  their  dealing  with  present 
day  peasants  who  act  like  the  folk  of  ancient  time.  Yeats, 
as  we  have  seen,  consistently  refused  to  consider  the  modern 
peasant  as  a fit  subject  for  the  folk  drama  of  imagination. 
Finally,  as  regards  the  spirit  of  the  new  Irish  drama,  tragedy 


-84- 


is  certainly  limited  to  no  regional  group  of  writers.  Mayne's 
The  Troth  and  Red  Turf  are  full  of  the  same  violent  feeling 
for  which  The  Birthright  has  been  criticised;  John  Ferguson 
and  Mixed  Marriage  are  as  truly  tragic  as  The  Moonlighters, 
Thomas  Muskerrv.  The  Shuiler's  Child,  or  any  other  of  the  best 
tragedies  of  the  new  Irish  drama. 

But,  say  the  critics,  Ulster  is  Protestant  and  Union- 
ist, the  rest  of  Ireland  Catholic  and  Nationalist.  To  be  true 
to  the  life  of  the  different  parts  of  the  country  the  drama 
should  show  this  difference;  the  plays  of  the  South  should  flame 
with  patriotic  and  nationalist  feeling,  while  those  of  the 
North  should  reflect  an  opposite  spirit.  To  a certain  extent 
that  is  exactly  the  case.  The  dramatic  dialogues  of  Padraic 
Pearse  are  weighted  with  an  agonized  protest  at  the  apathy  of 
the  nation;  in  them  gleams  that  clear  love  of  country  which  was 
to  cost  the  author  his  life  in  the  cause  of  Irish  freedom. 

The  mention  of  Pearse  always  brings  to  mind  Thomas  MacDonagh, 
who  was  killed  in  the  Easter  uprising.  His  single  well-known 
Play,  .When  the  Dawn  is  Come,  contrasts  with  Pearse* s in  pleading 
his  cause  against  a dull  nation  by  telling,  not  of  past  up- 
risings, but  of  the  successful  one  which  is  to  come  in  the 
future.  Fitzmaurice 1 s Moonlighters  is  a dramatization  of  the 
reaction  of  an  old  man  who  has  been  a staunch  Fenian  in  '86 
to  the  rebellious  plans  of  the  young  men  about  him  whom  he 
distrusts  as  blackguards  because  of  their  noisy  talk  about 


-85- 


Nationalism.  When  he  realizes  that  most  of  them  are  sincere, 
he  goes  out  to  die  with  one  of  them. 

Robinson  has  three  plays  dealing  with  this  passion 
of  Irishmen  for  independence:  The  Dreamers  and  The  Lost  Leader, 
studies  of  the  national  heroes,  Emmet  and  Parnell,  and  The 
Patriot » a play  charged  with  a pessimistic  feeling  that  Irish 
blood  no  longer  runs  red,  that  Irish  spirit  is  no  longer  heroic  . 
Its  satire  is  double,  one  point  directed  toward  the  old  style 
rebels  who  brought  misery  to  themselves  and  their  families 
without  accomplishing  their  end,  and  the  other  toward  the  new 
reformist  methods  which  in  1912  seemed  to  have  vitiated  prosper- 
ous modern  Ireland.  Thus  Ann  Nugent,  who  from  a passionately 
devoted  bride  has  been  hardened  into  an  intensely  practical 
business  woman  during  her  husband's  imprisonment,  cries  out: 

"Oh  don't  talk  to  me  of  patriotism— I *m  sick  of  it.  It's  made 
Sullivan  a bankrupt;  it's  made  Brennan  a drunkard;  you  a mur- 
derer; it's  destroyed  my  happiness;  it's  made  Rose  a cripple... 
your  mad  patriotic  selfishness."  On  the  other  hand  there  is 
a warning  against  the  men  who  have  grown  away  from  Nugent’s 
Brand-like  patriotism;  who  say  with  Father  Kearney:  "Give  it 
up,  James.  It  was  very  good  fun  twenty  years  ago  when  we  were 
all  young  and  felt  that  life  was  a desperately  serious  thing, 
and  that  Ireland  would  sink  under  the  3ea  if  we  didn't  cut  her 
free  from  England.  But  we  are  older  now,  and  more  sensible, 
and  we  feel  that  things  are  gradually  working  right." 


-86- 


When  one  turns  to  the  plays  of  the  northern  group 
which  deal  with  political  subjects,  the  contrast  at  first  seems 
overwhelmingly  great . Here  the  satire  is  all  directed  towards 
the  fatal  weakness  of  Ulster,  the  bigotry  which  is  fed  by 
English  politicians  and  by  industrialist  propaganda.  The  at- 
titude of  the  typical  Ulsterite  is  in  the  righteously  indignant 
explosion  of  Aunt  Marget  in  Purcell's  The  Enthusiast:  "What 
else  cud  ye  expect  but  a fight,  bringin'  Home  Rulers  an' 
Catholics  and  Dippers  an'  tramps,  an'  a'  the  riff-raffs  o'  the 
country  into  the  same  field.  It's  f lyin'  in  the  face  o' 
Providence."  It  is  this  entire  lack  of  feeling  of  national 
solidarity  which  is  satirized  in  the  Ulster  plays.  Gerald 
MacNamara  gets  a great  deal  of  slightly  bitter  fun  in  deline- 
ating Thompson,  a typical  North  peasant  whose  stock  of  Irish 
historical  knowledge  consists  of  the  facts  that  King  William 
crossed  the  Boyne  in  1690  and  that  King  Henry  VIII.  was  a 
"Roman"  till  he  was  converted;  who  defines  the  enemies  of  the 
country  as  "peelers",  although  he  admits  that  they  are  to  be 
tolerated  because  "they're  useful  sometimes  for  putting  down 
them  terrible  atrocities  in  the  South  and  West." 

The  themes  of  The  Enthusiast.  Mixed  Marriage,  and 
The  Orangeman  have  already  been  spoken  of  as  being  identical: 
the  revolt  of  youth  against  the  bigotry  of  its  environment . 
Superf icially  this  theme  has  little  in  common  with  the  fervently 
patriotic  plays  of  the  South.  And  yet  is  not  the  underlying 


-8  7- 


motive  for  all  of  these  plays  practically  the  same  as  the  motive 
for  the  Abbey  plays — the  author's  desire  for  a unified  Ireland? 
There  is  nationalism  equal  to  any  Dublin  enthusiast's  in  Michael 
O’Connor's  passionate  efforts  to  unite  "Cathliks  and  Prodesan" 
and  in  his  feeling  that  personal  happiness  is  to  be  sacrificed 
to  his  cause.  "It's  Irelan ' agin  you.  Irelan''s  a bigger 
thing  nor  you  an'  Hugh  an'  me  an'  all  o'  us  rowled  thegither." 
The  patriotic  spirit  of  the  North  is  in  these  young  men  who 
rebel  against  the  hard  intolerance  and  short-eightedness  of 
Ulster.  One  of  the  best  expressions  of  this  feeling  is  in 
the  words  of  James  McKinstry  (The  Enthusiast)  who  has  tried  to 
persuade  his  neighbors  to  transcend  their  religious  and  politi- 
cal differences  by  entering  into  a co-operative  farming  move- 
ment . When  he  returns  from  the  resulting  fray,  battered  and 
disillusioned,  he  says  sadly,  "And  to  think  they  are  so  blind 
that  they  lose  sight  of  their  true  interests  and  stone  their 
friends  for  the  sake  of  a meaningless  catch-word."  The  more 
one  studies  these  northern  plays  the  more  one  is  convinced  that 
after  all  their  spirit  is  in  fundamental  harmony  with  that  of 
the  other  contemporary  Irish  plays  . The  thrust  against  Ulster 
separatist  disposition  is  too  sharp  and  too  universal  to  admit 
of  any  interpretation  but  a love  of  country  as  deep  and  as 
clear-eyed  as  that  which  animates  the  other  Irish  realists. 

Both  groups  of  writers  struggle  against  the  dull  apathy  or 
hot  wrong-headedness  which  they  see  about  them.  Only  the 


-88- 


conditions  causing  these  popular  qualities  differ.  In  Ulster 
it  is  religious  bigotry;  in  Leinster  and  Connacht,  it  is  lack 
of  proper  educational  system  and  too  great  a pre-occupation 
with  the  business  of  building  prosperous  farms.  But  the  es- 
sentials are  not  in  such  great  contrast  as  at  first  appeared. 

Again,  if  "regional  realism"  is  so  characteristic  of 
the  recent  plays  as  most  critics  have  insisted  and  as  one  who 
reads  newspaper  accounts  of  riots  and  civil  war  would  naturally 
suppose,  differences  in  character-types  should  be  so  outstanding 
as  to  be  unmistakable.  Surely  here  at  least  will  be  contrast- 
ing human  qualities  which  may  explain  the  animosity  of  the 
orange  and  green  wearers  . 

If  one  had  read  the  peasant  plays  of  only  Synge  and 
Lady  C-regory  and  should  then  come  to  these  stories  of  Ulster 
Presbyterians,  one  would  undoubtedly  feel  himself  in  a new 
world.  The  Scotch-Irishman  with  his  complacent  consciousness 
of  being  a pillar  in  the  church  and  his  canny  ability  to  get  on 
by  the  simple  formulae  of  watching  the  pennies  and  preserving 
himself  a respectable  figure  is  widely  removed  from  Synge's 
tinkers  and  tramps  and  Lady  Gregory's  quaint  villagers.  But 
if  one  attempts  to  compare  this  same  Scotch-Irishman  with  char- 
acters from  other  realistic  plays  striking  parallels  are  im- 
mediately evident.  Enough  has  been  said  in  preceding  chapters 
to  prepare  for  the  statement  which  might  otherwise  seem  a bit 
startling  that  there  is  scarcely  a type  of  character  in  any 


, 


-69- 


play  which  is  not  closely  paralleled  in  the  plays  of  another 
section  of  the  country . Some  of  the  most  interesting  of  these 
recurring  types  may  be  discussed  briefly. 

Many  of  them  have  already  been  mentioned.  For 
instance  the  shiftless  Irishman  who  gives  himself  up  to  idle 
dreaming  until  he  is  utterly  worthless  except  as  ornamental 
furnishing  of  life,  as  pictured  in  Uncle  Daniel  Murray,  Dominic 
Donnelly,  and  Denis  Geoghegan,  has  been  discussed  for  his 
prosiness.  But  for  the  present  point  at  issue  the  significant 
thing  about  this  trilogy  is  the  fact  that  they  hail  from  Ulster, 
the  Midlands,  and  County  Cork  respectively.  There  is  nothing 
about  any  of  these  triflers  to  prevent  their  being  interchanged. 
Denis,  to  be  sure,  is  partly  fcrgiveable  for  his  youth  and 
personal  charm,  but  give  him  fifteen  years  and  the  moral  re- 
sponsibility of  someone  dependent  upon  him  and  he  will  be  as 
despicable  as  Dominic  Donnelly,  unless  his  right-about-face 
at  the  end  of  the  play  is  more  thorough-going  than  we  are  apt 
to  give  him  credit  for. 

Similarly  in  discussing  the  "hard  farmer”  considerable 
time  was  spent  upon  William  James  Granahan,  John  Murray,  Murtagh 
Cosgar,  Dan  Fogarty,  Maurice  Hurley,  and  Bat  Morrissey.  Is 
it  necessary  to  point  out  the  fact  that  these  characters  are 
equally  distributed  among  our  "regional”  groups?  Blind  love 
of  the  land  and  of  prosperity  is  the  same  powerful  motive  in 
Catholic  old  Timothy  Hurley  as  in  Sunday-School  teacher  William 


-90- 


James  Granahan . It  inspires  one  to  commit  arson  and  the  other 
to  cheat  his  neighbors  and  outrage  his  own  paternal  instincts. 
Three  other  fathers,  one  from  each  broad  division  of  Ireland, 
are  also  guilty  of  parental  tyranny  of  the  grossest  sort,  John 
Rainey,  Murtagh  Cosgar  and  Bat  Morriesey.  Each  is  equally 
obstinate,  equally  blind  to  his  own  best  interests,  equally 
violent,  and  in  the  end  equally  deserving  of  our  pity.  Change 
Rainey's  environment  from  the  Belfast  ship-yards  to  an  Ulster 
farm  and  his  violent  bigotry  would  shade  off  into  a love  of 
the  land  which  will  be  exactly  the  same  force  in  his  life  as 
that  which  motivates  Cosgar  and  Morrissey.  We  know  this  be- 
cause the  Ulster  farmers,  the  Granahan  men  except  Robbie  John, 
the  McKinstry  father  and  son,  John  Murray  and  the  Me Minns , and 
Ebenezer  McKie,  are  as  deeply  attached  to  the  soil  as  any 
Leinster  peasant  could  possibly  be. 

If  the  fathers  of  Ireland  seem  curiously  alike  in 
these  plays  there  is  a no  less  important  resemblance  in  many 
of  the  mothers.  As  examples  of  the  women  who  spend  untold 
energy  in  smoothing  off  the  roughnesses  of  their  men  folks  and 
in  mediating  in  their  quarrels  compare  Mrs.  Rainey,  Mrs.  Mor- 
rissey and  Mrs  . Crilly  . Throughout  the  plays  these  women  are 
on  a constant  strain  of  trying  to  soothe  their  hot-tempered, 
much-demanding  men.  Like  Mrs.  Rainey,  they  are  all  "patient 
with  the  awful  patience  of  a woman  who  has  always  submitted 
to  her  husband's  will,  without  ever  respecting  him." 


But 


- 


-91- 


even  Mrs.  Rainey  grows  tired  of  her  life  of  perpetual  peace- 
making and  exclaims:  "Aw,  there's  times  when  a wumman's  sick  o' 
men  an'  their  folly.  Can't  ye  go  through  the  wurl ' without 
hammerin'  wan  another  like  bastes  o'  the  field?"  Maura 
Morrissey  rushes  between  her  sons  to  prevent  their  violence 
and  when  the  trouble  is  temporarily  averted,  pleads  dis- 
tractedly with  first  one  then  the  other  of  them:  "Whist,  whist, 
for  God's  sake'.  Let  us  have  no  more  words  this  blessed  night. 
Say  your  prayers  and  go  to  bed,  the  two  of  ye,  in  the  name  of 
God.  'Tis  very  late.  Won't  you,  Shane?  Won't  you,  Hugh?" 
Mrs.  Crilly,  Thomas  Muskerry's  daughter,  almost  seems  to  sum 
up  the  feeling  of  a vast  group  of  Irishwomen,  whether  from  the 
North  or  South,  when  she  says,  "I  have  to  make  bits  of  myself 
to  mind  everything  and  be  prepared  for  everything." 

On  the  other  hand  a type  of  woman  entirely  different 
from  Mrs.  Rainey  and  Mrs.  Morrissey  is  found  in  the  plays  of 
each  "region".  Is  there  any  essential  unlikeness  in  Sarah 
McLinn,  Mrs  . Grogan,  and  Mrs . Clancy?  Each  is  cunning,  domin- 
eering, and  avaricious  . One  feels  that  they  would  be  equally 
unpleasant  to  live  with.  Other  women  who  bear  marked  re- 
semblance to  each  other  are  Mrs.  Harte,  Mrs.  Cather,  and  Mrs. 
Mulroy . They  all  use  the  old  argument  of  the  child's  duty 
toward  the  family  to  force  him  to  do  what  his  conscience  dis- 
approves of  . Maurice  Harte  is  tender  enough  to  accede  to  his 
mother's  wishes;  Kitty  Mulroy  submits  without  much  protest  to 


. 


I 


-93- 


her  betrothal  to  a middle  aged  man  whom  she  despises,  but  she 
is  relieved  of  her  promise  by  circumstances;  Maggie  Cather, 
whose  nature  has  been  toughened  by  her  years  of  suffering, 
stands  out  stoutly  against  Mrs.  Gather.  None  of  these  mothers 
are  despicable.  They  are  only  weak — weak  enough  to  bend  moral- 
ly when  harassed  too  much.  One  feels  that  Ervine's  character- 
ization of  Mrs.  Ferguson  is  an  apt  description  of  all  of  them: 
"She  is  not  a very  intelligent  woman,  and  so  her  sympathies 
are  sometimes  flattened  by  her  lack  of  perception,  but,  within 
her  limitations,  she  is  an  excellent  wife  and  mother. n 

While  Irish  girlhood  is  not  treated  as  intensively 
as  adult  womanhood,  even  in  the  somewhat  sketchy  characteriza- 
tions which  are  given,  it  is  impossible  not  to  note  the  re- 
currence of  types  in  plays  of  different  provinces.  Mary  Murray 
in  The  Drone,  Mary  Crilly  in  Thomas  Muskerrv.  Min  Delane  in 
The  Country  Dressmaker.  Sheila  in  The  Building  Fund,  and  Delia 
Duffy,  Denis  Geoghegan's  sweetheart,  are  all  alike  in  being 
alert,  pretty,  not  too  intelligent,  scheming  minxes  with  a 
strong  dash  of  the  flirtatious  in  their  natures.  They  will 
develop,  one  feels,  into  wives  and  mothers  "excellent,  within 
their  limitations".  Nora  O'Connor  in  Mixed  Marriage  is,  per- 
haps, the  outstanding  example  of  a girl  who  puts  her  love 
above  everything  else,  but  Anne  Hourican,  a Midland's  girl, 
and  Julia,  the  sentimental  dressmaker  of  Fitzmaurice 1 s comedy, 
are  not  far  behind  her  in  their  clinging  to  love  in  the  face 


-93- 


of  obstacles.  On  the  other  hand  Maire  Hourican,  Ellen  Douras, 
and  Ellen  McCarthy,  also  from  different  parts  of  the  country, 
place  other  aspirations  above  love. 

The  maternal  passion  of  Mrs.  Ferguson  in  the  affect- 
ing scene  when  Andrew  declares  he  must  confess  is  equalled  by 
the  love  of  Moll  Woods'  in  O'Kelly 's  The  Shuller's  Child  which 
flames  into  the  cry,  "Where  am  I to  turn...  I could  face 
hardships  unfearing  with  the  child....  What  does  a child  sig- 
nify to  a woman  if  it  is  not  the  grace  of  God?";  and  in  the 
desperation  of  childless  Nannie  when  the  Shuiler's  child  is 
taken  from  her.  It  is  noteworthy  here  that  the  two  women 
vagabonds  who  appear  in  the  new  Irish  drama,  one,  Peg  Straw, 
is  from  the  extreme  North  in  the  Donegal  mountain  country,  and 
the  other,  Moll  Woods,  from  the  extreme  south,  Cork  County. 

There  remain  to  be  mentioned  a few  other  analogies 
of  character  which  are  surely  very  striking  in  plays  whose 
realism  is  only  "regional".  The  three  young  men  who  are  most 
truly  in  love  have  already  been  discussed — Hugh  Rainey,  Matt 
Cosgar,  and  Owen  Morrissey — one  from  each  part  of  the  country. 
The  exceptional  Irishman  to  whom  art  is  more  than  comfort,  more 
than  the  land,  more  than  life,  is  also,  curiously  enough,  por- 
trayed in  three  men  from  Ulster,  the  Midlands,  and  County  Kerry. 
Robbie  John  Granahan  is  a mere  youngster,  Conn  Hourican  in  the 


prime  of  his  life,  and  Lem  Donohue  (in  The  Pie-Dish)  a very  old 
man.  In  spite  of  their  varying  years,  they  behave  strangely 


' 


-94- 


alike.  Robbie  John  leaves  home,  love,  and  sure,  comfortable 
livelihood  to  develop  the  musical  gift  which  is  his.  Conn 
Hourican  says  thoughtfully  as  he  bids  farewell  to  an  old  age 
of  ease  and  comfort,  "I'm  leaving  the  land  behind  me;  but 
what's  the  land  after  all  against  the  music  that  comes  from 
the  far,  strange  places,  when  the  night  is  on  the  ground  and 
the  bird  in  the  grass  is  quiet?"  One  cannot  but  think  that 
when  life  is  over  they,  like  Lem  Donohue,  will  bargain  salvation 

9 

for  the  opportunity  to  finish  their  artistic  labor,  if  it  is 
not  already  completed.  There  is  no  essential  difference  in 
these  three  men  who  are  such  unusual  figures  in  the  realistic 
peasant  drama.  As  a final  reminder  that  recent  playwrights 
do  not  see  Irish  life  as  something  which  changes  radically 
with  province  boundaries,  attention  may  be  called  to  the  three 
old  men  of  the  new  drama,  Grandfather  Granahan,  Uncle  Bartle 
°i  Tne  Mineral  Workers,  and  Lem  Donohue,  charming  characters 
all  of  them,  with  a singularly  similar  philosophy  of  the  homely 
wisdom  that  comes  from  long  years  of  observation. 

Parallels  of  this  sort  could  be  multiplied  to  far 
greater  length,  but  surely  enough  has  been  said  to  prove  the 
contention  that  the  term  "regional  realism"  as  applied  to  new 
Irish  drama  is  only  half  true.  No  just  critic  could  feel  that 
there  are  no  differences  in  the  plays  of  the  different  prov- 
inces— it  has  been  the  purpose  of  this  chapter  to  show,  not 
that  there  is  no  "regional  realism",  but  that  this  phrase, 


-95- 


which  has  so  lightly  passed  from  one  critic  to  another,  ex- 
aggerates the  differences  which  do  undoubtedly  exist . In 
conclusion,  it  is  but  fair  to  Weygandt  to  quote  a few  sentences 
in  which  he  sums  up  the  similarities,  after  stressing  the  dis- 
similarities of  Irish  life.  "And  yet,  definite  as  are  these 
distinctions,  life  in  various  parts  of  Ireland  seems  much  alike, 
class  for  class,  as  it  is  represented  by  many  contemporaneous 
playwrights,  whether  the  scenes  of  their  plays  are  Down  or 
Kerry,  Galway  or  Wicklow.  A tinker  is  a tinker  wherever  you 
find  him,  a strong  farmer  a strong  farmer,  a landlord  a land- 
lord." How  true  these  words  are  we  have  seen.  It  is  only 

to  be  regretted  that  they  are  so  carelessly  thrown  into  a 
chapter  which  otherwise  insists  throughout  upon  "regional 
realism . " 


1*  Irish  Plavs  and  Playwrights,  p.  316. 


. 


-96- 


CHAPTER  V. 

LENNOX  ROBINSON  AND  ST.  JOHN  ERVINE. 

In  any  study  of  a literary  school  there  is  always 
danger  of  seeming  to  lump  the  group  of  writers  into  a level 
mass  with  no  figures  of  outstanding  merit.  In  order  to  avoid 
this  risk  of  false  perspective  it  seems,  therefore,  advisable, 
if  not  absolutely  necessary,  to  discuss  at  some  length  the 
two  playwrights  whose  work  has  received  most  wide-spread  notice. 
Anyone  who  has  read  the  dramatic  criticism  of  books,  magazines, 
and  daily  press  during  the  last  seven  years  knows  at  once  what 
names  will  be  selected — Lennox  Robinson  and  St.  John  Ervine  . 
Mayne’s  two  plays.  The  Turn  of  the  Road  and  The  Drone  are 
among  the  best  comedies  in  the  whole  field  of  modern  drama. 
Murray's  two  tragedies.  The  Birthright  and  Maurice  Harte.  par- 
ticularly the  latter,  are  as  impressive  in  their  simplicity 
and  dignified  realism  as  anything  that  Robinson  and  Ervine 
have  done.  But  neither  Mayne  nor  Murray  have  since  the  Great 
War  swept  down  upon  Europe  done  anything  to  develop  their  art. 

In  the  work  of  both  Robinson  and  Ervine,  however,  there  has 
been  a steady  development,  and  they  are  writing  constantly. 

For  Mayne  and  Murray  playwriting  has  been  only  a passing  avo- 
cation; their  real  professions  are,  respectively,  acting  and 
teaching.  Robinson  and  Ervine  are  writers  by  profession, 


« 


. 


' -r 


-97- 


and  thus  have  to  their  credit  many  more  significant  plays  than 
the  two  each  by  which  the  other  men  are  best  known.  Hence, 
it  is,  on  every  account,  proper  to  choose  these  men  who  by  the 
quantity  and  quality  of  their  dramatic  output  and  by  their 
managership  of  the  Abbey  Theatre  are  most  significant  among 
the  Irish  realists. 

Lennox  Robinson  was  born  in  Cork,  October  4,  1886. 

His  father  was  a clergyman  whose  charges  were  always  in  the 
Southwest  of  Ireland,  consequently  Robinson  understands  the 
life  of  County  Cork  as  thoroughly  as  do  Murray  and  the  novelist 
Daniel  Corkery,  whose  Yellow  Bittern  has  been  so  popular  on 
Irish  stages.  Writing  seems  to  have  fascinated  him  from 
his  boyhood,  for  while  yet  a mere  youngster  he  edited  an  amateur 
magazine.  We  have  it  on  the  authority  of  Weygandt  that  it 
was  a visit  of  the  Abbey  Theatre  company  to  Cork  which  first 
turned  Robinson’s  thought  toward  the  drama,  which  was  in  those 
days  (1907  or  1908)  the  great  literary  activity  of  Ireland. 

We  know,  however,  that  there  was  a Dramatic  Society  in  Cork,  and 
it  is  probable  that  Robinson  was  interested  in  playwriting  be- 
fore he  saw  the  famous  group  of  Abbey  actors.  At  any  rate, 
his  first  play  The  Clancy  Name  was  presented  in  the  Abbey  when 
he  was  barely  twenty-two. 

In  the  thirteen  years  since  that  time  his  life  has 
been  full  of  literary  work.  Six  plays,  a novel  which  had  to 


. 


' 


' 


-98- 


be  rewritten  because  the  original  manuscript  was  burned  during 
the  bombardment  of  Dublin  in  the  Easter  uprising,  a volume  of 
short  stories,  and  many  articles  for  literary  periodicals  have 
been  published  over  his  name.  In  addition  to  his  work  as  an 
author,  Robinson  has  been  busy  with  the  task  of  building  up 
Irish  rural  libraries,  and  as  director  of  the  Abbey  Theatre 
has  traveled  and  lectured  extensively  besides  struggling  hero- 
ically to  rebuild  the  company  after  the  demoralization  of  the 
war.  Surely  a busy  thirteen  years'. 

Excluding  The  Whit e-headed  Bov.  Robinson  plays  fall 
naturally  into  two  groups,  the  earlier  one  comprising  those 
written  before  1912  and  having  for  a theme  some  social  condition 
in  Ireland.  In  this  list  are  The  Clancy  Name . The  Cross-Roads. 
ant^  The  Harvest,  all  three  of  which  have  been  mentioned  often 
in  former  chapters  . The  other  group  began  with  The  Patriots 
in  1912  and  deals  with  political  themes — with  Ireland  as  a 
nation  trying  to  discover  its  destiny.  Besides  The  Patriots 
this  groups  includes  The  Dreamers . first  produced  in  1915,  just 
a year  before  the  Easter  up-rising,  and  The  Lost  Leader  in 
1919.  Robinson's  single  comedy.  The  Whit e-headed  Bov,  which, 
because  it  is  so  unlike  his  other  work,  must  be  classed  by 
itself , had  its  premiere  at  the  end  of  1916,  and  has  been  on 
the  boards  almost  ever  since. 

The_Q.la.ncy  Name,  although  melodramatic  and  lacking 
Robinson's  later  mastery  of  prolonged  suspense,  is  really  a 

remarkable  first  play.  The  delineation  of  Mrs.  Clancy's 


character  and  the  grasp  on  dialect  are  scarcely  improved  in 
the  j.ater  plays;  the  compactness  and  singleness  of  tragic  effect 
are  in  every  way  admirable.  Moreover,  this  first  play  struck 
Robinson ' s characteristic  vein:  a keen  sense  of  the  irony  of 
human  ambition.  On  the  very  day  when  Mrs.  Clancy  pays  off 
her  mortgage  and  feels  that  at  last  the  family  name  which  she 
idolizes  is  to  be  free  from  all  stain  of  disrespect,  she  dis- 
covers that  her  only  son  is  a murderer.  In  this  little  one- 
act  piece  there  is  real  tragic  effect,  a notable  achievement 
for  so  young  a writer  as  Robinson  was  at  that  time.  One 
probably  still  more  unusual  is  the  artistic  compression  which 
could  crowd  into  one  speech  so  much  of  character,  dialect, 
past  history,  theme,  and  atmosphere  as  are  in  one  which  Mrs. 
Clancy  utters  early  in  the  play:  "Well,  I've  got  you  here  to-day 
to  pay  you  back  the  money  I borrowed  from  you  five  years  ago 
when  the  Lisless  bank  broke  and  my  husband  lost  all  his  money. 

He  was  always  sickly  and  the  shock  of  losing  his  money  and  the 
disgrace  killed  him  altogether.  So  there  was  I,  left  without 
a penny,  and  a whole  bag  of  debts.  There's  many  a woman  would 
have  sold  the  farm  and  paid  what  she  could  and  rested  content 
all  her  life,  but  I couldn't  do  that  . 'T?/as  never  said  before 
that  a Clancy  couldn't  pay  his  debts." 

From  the  promising  beginning  of  The  Clancy  Name 
Robinson  passed  to  more  ambitious  attempts  in  The  Cross-Roads 
and  The_, _Ha r vest , three  act  plays  which  appeared  in  1903  and 


\, 


' 


-100- 


1910.  Neither  of  them,  it  must  be  admitted,  lives  up  to  the 
expectation  created  by  The  Clancy  Name  . Both  are  melodramatic; 
both  are  so  obviously  propagandist ic  in  tone  that  they  remind 
one  of  Brieux  at  his  worst;  and  somehow  both  fail  to  be  con- 
vincing. Yet  they  have  not  lacked  critics  who  praise  them 

highly.  Thus  Weygandt  insists  that  "after  the  needless  pro- 

logue" of  The  Cross-Roads  "it  is  fine  art  through  to  the  end,"'*' 
and  that  the  reading  of  the  Irish  peasant  in  Tom  Dempsey,  severe 
though  it  be,  is  not  distorted. 

Attention  has  been  called  in  previous  paragraphs  to 
most  of  the  faults  of  The  Cross-Roads:  its  melodramatic  ex- 
aggeration of  Tom  Dempsey's  brutality;  the  incredible  supposi- 
tion that  Ellen's  loveless  marriage  has  put  a black  curse  not 
only  upon  herself  and  her  husband  but  upon  the  farm  until  the 
stock  dies  of  disease,  the  hens  refuse  to  lay,  and  the  land 
loses  its  productivity;  the  lack  of  unified  impression  caused 
by  the  glaring  contrast  of  Ellen  in  the  first  and  last  scenes 
might  also  have  been  emphasized.  These  things,  which  in  read- 
ing one  dismisses  as  improbable,  do  not,  however,  so  greatly 
affect  the  spectators  many  of  whom  report  that  they  were  carried 
away  by  the  play,  feeling  it  a poignant,  human  tragedy  of  a 
soul  which  misunderstood  values.  This  attitude  of  those  who 
have  seen  the  play  shows,  as  nothing  else  could,  that  no  matter 
what  other  artistic  sense  Robinson  may  lose  momentarily,  his 
feeling  for  stage  effect  never  slips. 


1 • Irish  Plays  and  Playwrights,  p . 224 . 


-101- 

Two  other  characteristics  of  Robinson  are  noticeable 
in  this  early  play.  First,  it  is  typical  of  his  ability  to 
choose  a theme  which  is  fundamental  in  Irish  life — a more  im- 
passioned protest  has  not  been  written  against  the  loveless 
marriage  system  of  Ireland  than  this  play  contains.  The  theme 
is  so  truly  great,  that  one  mourns  any  but  perfect  treatment. 

The  second  characteristic  is  the  irony  which  runs  through  all 
of  Robinson's  work.  In  this  play  it  appears  in  the  failure 
of  Ellen  to  create  happiness  or  even  prosperity  for  herself 
when  the  up-to-date  methods  she  advocates  are  all  the  time  en- 
riching her  neighbors  and  making  her  community  known  even  in 
Dublin  as  progressive.  After  all.  The  Cross-Roads  does  not 
measure  up  so  far  below  the  apprentice  plays  of  many  a dramatist 
whose  mature  work  holds  secure  claim  to  greatness. 

In  The  Harvest  there  is  a notable  improvement  in 
dramatic  technique.  Here  the  impression  is  thoroughly  unified 
and  the  action  condensed  into  three  weeks.  While  its  peasant 
figures  lack  the  excessive  brutality  of  Tom  Dempsey,  it  is 
in  some  respects  the  most  naturalistic  of  Robinson's  plays. 
Environment  and  hereditary  weakness  and  especially  educational 
training  have  made  the  Hurley  young  people  what  they  are;  no 
particular  guilt  is  attached  to  them  in  their  failure  to  help 
their  father.  If  we  grant  the  author's  premise,  we  are  in- 
clined to  condone  even  the  crime  of  old  Timothy,  so  indignant 
are  we  at  the  educational  system  which  has  caused  all  the 


. jmm-,  i 

• r-j  - I j I .1  ( . . ■ | 


-102- 


trouble  . But  we  have  a canny  suspicion  that  Lennox  Robinson 
may  be  writing  of  life  that  he  knows  little  of,  for  there  is 
weakness  in  The  Harvest,  a failure  to  convince  which  none  of 
the  other  plays  has  in  like  degree.  After  watching  the  father 
of  the  Hurleys  fire  his  property  in  order  to  defraud  the  in- 
surance company,  we  do  not  believe  that  the  educational  system 
is  all  that  is  affecting  the  young  Hurleys;  we  fail  to  thrill 
to  Mary’s  blase  defiance;  we  doubt  that  a young  peasant  would 
have  been  so  soon  weakened  physically  as  Jack  is;  and  our  common 
sense  prompts  us  to  think  it  highly  improbable  that  in  a family 
ol  six  children  not  one  would  be  able  and  willing  to  rescue 
the  old  homestead— that  of  the  lot  who  were  felt  to  be  so 
promising,  not  one  except  Maurice  who  has  stayed  on  the  farm 
is  more  than  self-supporting.  This  feeling  that  the  char- 
acters are  only  pawns  which  Robinson  has  used  to  prove  his 
point  causes  Weygandt,  recalling  the  fact  that  while  writing 
The  Harvest  Robinson  spent  some  time  in  England  with  Shaw  and 
Barker,  to  exclaim,  "It  is  but  another  of  many  illustrations  of 
the  blight  that  Mr.  Shaw  has  brought  upon  the  modern  English 
stage . " 

One  must  admit,  however,  that  the  play  is  readable. 
There  are  interesting  touches  of  characterization,  flashes  of 
humor,  and  above  all  Robinson's  own  irony  which  go  far  toward 
redeeming  the  play  from  utter  triviality.  One  of  the  best 
endings  of  any  modern  drama  is  in  this  one.  The  situation 


. 


' 


m 


-103- 


has  resolved  itself:  Timothy  is  to  draw  his  insurance  money; 

Jack  has  given  up  his  idealistic  struggle  in  disgust;  Mary  is 
going  back  to  her  shameful  life  in  London;  Patrick  has  changed 
his  name  and  religion  . But  William  Lordan,  the  old  school 
master  who  has  mis-trained  them  all,  knowing  nothing  of  the 
seamy  side  of  the  story  of  his  former  pupils,  congratulates 
himself  upon  what  he  ha3  done  for  them  and  plans  similar  careers 
for  bright  pupils  now  in  his  school.  ’’May  God  grant  me  a few 
more  years  of  health  and  strength  till  I do  with  them  what  I've 
done  with  Mary  and  Patrick,”  he  prays  complacently. 

With  the  appearance  of  The  Patriots  in  1913,  a new 
epoch  in  Robinson's  dramatic  career  began.  As  has  been  said, 
it  is  the  dramatization  of  the  Irish  political  spirit  which  a 
few  years  later  found  expression  in  the  Sinn  Fein  movement  . 

In  both  technique  and  theme  it  set  the  form  of  all  the  later 
plays  except  The  White-headed  Boy.  It  is  difficult  to  speak 
of  this  play  in  any  but  enthusiastic  terms.  The  action  is 
closely  knit;  there  is  a constant  tightening  of  interest  and 
a sense  of  inevitability;  a balance  and  completeness  which  many 
of  the  plays  of  the  realists  do  not  have;  above  all  one  finds  a 
mixture  of  pathos  and  humor  which  is  masterly  . The  character- 
ization is  sure,  even  in  the  minor  persons.  The  two  fussy  old 
uncles,  Ann's  brothers,  are  clearly  presented  and  stand  out 
delightfully  against  the  stereotyped  figures  of  Robinson's 
earlier  plays.  The  author's  keenest  satire  finds  expression 


-104- 


in  the  speech  of  Uncle  Bob:  "I'd  have  had  the  country  in  a flame 
only  for  my  wretched  health.  But  I done  what  I could.  I 
done  what  I could.  It'9  no  joke  being  secretary  to  the  League, 
I can  tell  you.  Why,  getting  up  these  winter  lectures  is  a 
big  job  in  itself,  and  there  are  always  resolutions  to  be  framed, 
and  addresses,  and — and  people  like  Starkie  to  pacify — oh,  it's 
very  wearing.  I sometimes  think  if  I had  withdrawn  from  it 
altogether  I might  have  got  back  my  health.  But  I'll  never 
withdraw.  I've  given  my  life  willingly — for  Ireland.  Isn't 
that  cocoa  ready?" 

The  political  interest  of  the  play  is,  however,  only 
half  of  it . The  turning  of  Ann  from  an  ardent  bride  to  a 
hardened  business  woman  is  real  human  drama.  "You  wooed  me 
passionately,  you  married  me  passionately  and  for  five  years 
you  dragged  me  after  you  round  the  country  kindling  my  patriot- 
ism at  the  flame  of  yours,  speaking  through  me  with  your  passion 
I was  never  myself  in  all  those  years  . I was  only  you.  You 
took  my  health,  my  strength,  my  beauty,  my  money,  and  you  spent 
them  prodigally,  and  at  twenty-six  I found  myself  old  and  ugly 
and  grey  and  worn  out— it's  no  use.  You  can't  kindle  me  again. 
I suppose  I'm  too  old." 

But  the  supreme  character  of  the  drama  is,  of  course, 
Nugent  himself,  the  old  fire-brand  who  has  hoarded  his  strength 
through  his  eighteen  prison  years  that  he  may  be  of  use  to 
"the  cause",  and  now  comes  out  to  find  that  the  cause  is  dead, 
his  former  comrades  occupied  with  lectures  and  luke-warm 


-105- 


petitions,  and  his  wife  able  to  say  dispassionately,  "I  think 
I hate  you,  James."  But  the  crowning  feature  of  his  tragedy 
is  his  final  realization  that  his  consecration  to  Ireland  has 
been  fruitless  of  anything  but  evil  . Eighteen  years  in  prison 
could  not  break  his  spirit,  but  the  disillusion  of  his  first 
days  at  home  transform  him  into  an  old  man,  "a  thing  to  be  told 
stories  about."  It  is  characteristic  of  Robinson  to  follow 
Nugent's  last  broken  speech  with  a remark  from  the  relieved 
janitor  that  now  since  the  patriotic  meeting  is  not  to  be  held, 
he  can  go  to  the  pictures  after  all. 

Hester  Travers  Smith,  writing  in  The  Drama  for  April 
1S31,  sums  up  the  merits  of  The  Patriots  as  "a  masterpiece 
from  the  technical  point  of  view.  It  is  far  less  the  drama 
of  situation  than  the  plays  which  followed  it.  It  has  fine 
proportions,  it  has  humor  which  never  descends  to  farce,  and  it 
has  knowledge  of  human  character." 

The  political  feeling  with  which  The  Patriots  is 
pregnant  finds  expression  in  Robinson's  next  play  also.  Here 
again  the  playwright  takes  no  partisan  stand  and  satirizes 
the  enthusiast  almost  as  keenly  as  his  leaden  followers.  The 
Dreamers  is  a dramatization  of  the  closing  episodes  of  Robert 
Emmet's  life;  the  failure  of  the  national  hero  is  presented  as 
in  large  measure  due  to  the  futility  and  untrustworthiness  of 
his  followers.  The  excitement  and  confusion  of  despair  are 
borne  home  to  the  spectator  who  sees  the  last  tragic  scenes 


. 


-106- 


from  the  fringe  of  the  crowd  which  gathers  about  Emmet  . Emmet 
himself  is  portrayed  in  a way  which  in  no  respect  suggests  a 
portrait,  if  one  is  to  accept  the  historical  account  of  him  as 
true  . 

With  the  exception  of  the  love-scenes,  which  are 
clumsily  enough  done,  the  play  is  well-written  throughout,  and 
shows  Robinson's  unusual  ability  to  handle  an  exceedingly  dif- 
ficult dramatic  situation.  There  is  nothing  amateurish  about 
the  way  the  plot  is  built  or  in  the  method  by  which  the  central 
figure  is  presented. 

Chronologically,  The  White-headed  Bov  is  the  next  of 
Robinson's  plays.  Although  he  says  we  are  to  regard  it  as 
having  political  significance,  it  is  never  considered  in  that 
light  . It  is  clever,  high-spirited,  entertaining  comedy  with 
decidedly  broad  humor.  The  slightness  of  the  plot  is  at  least 
partly  compensated  for  by  the  carefulness  with  which  it  is 
worked  out,  and  by  the  clearness  of  the  characterization. 

Enough  has  been  said  of  this  very  popular  comedy  in  preceding 
paragraphs  so  that  it  may  now  be  passed  over  with  the  appre- 
ciative comment  of  E.  A.  Boyd,  who  has  been  exceedingly  chary 
of  praise  for  the  whole  group  of  Irish  realists:  "The  strength 
of  this  play  undoubtedly  lies  in  the  perfect  combination  of 
form  and  content,  and  the  natural,  unstrained  drollery  of 
speech  combined  with  a subject  which  develops  realistically 
and  logically,  yet  whose  humor  is  that  of  cumulative  effect. 


-107- 


There  is  not  a deliberately  manufactured  phrase  in  it,  not  one 
situation  that  is  forced  and  stagey,  for  the  whole  comedy  arises 
out  of  the  relations  which  inevitably  establish  themselves 
between  the  characters."1  But  for  all  that,  one  has  reason 
to  doubt  that  comedy  is  Robinson's  real  medium.  His  attitude 
toward  life  is  too  serious  and  his  temperament  too  gauntly  that 
of  an  artist  who  longs  for  better  days  to  allow  him  to  be  satis- 
fied with  comedy  of  the  type  of  The  Whit e-headed  Bov. 

Robinson's  last  play,  The  Lost  Leader,  was  produced 
in  the  same  season  as  Drinkwater's  Abraham  Lincoln  and  created 
almost  as  much  of  public  sensation  and  critical  dissension. 

It  deals  with  the  return  of  Ireland's  "lost  leader,"  dramatiz- 
ing the  legend  that  Parnell  did  not  die,  but  merely  retired 
to  peaceful  seclusion  to  wait  until  his  country  should  need 
him  again.  The  plot  is  briefly  this:  a psycho-analyst  on  a 
vacation  in  a remote  Irish  village  playfully  experiments  with 
a London  journalist,  also  on  a vacation.  A strange  old  pea- 
sant, Lucius  Lenihan,  who  is  in  the  room,  is  hypnotized  along 
with  the  journalist,  and  the  scientist,  seeing  in  him  a "subject 
questions  him— bringing  back  to  him  memories  which  had  been 
buried.  When  in  the  course  of  the  questioning  he  is  asked 
his  name  he  replies  clearly  and  proudly,  "Charles  Stewart 
Parnell."  According  to  Rebecca  West  the  pronunciation  of 


1.  Introduction  to  The  White-headed  Bov. 


. 


. 


-108- 


these  words  sent  a thrill  through  London  audiences  such  as  they 
had  not  felt  in  our  generation  of  play -going.  The  lost  leader, 
now  restored  to  his  consciousness,  prepares  to  deliver  his 
message  to  Ireland,  but  before  he  can  get  it  out,  he  is  killed 
•by  a hurly  stick  thrown  by  a singer  at  a sneering  gombeen  man. 
When  the  men  who  have  been  called  to  identify  the  man  as  Parnell, 
arrive,  they  cannot  decide.  "Is  that  Parnell?  It  might  be  — 

I don't  know"  is  as  definite  a3  they  can  be. 

It  is  this  failure  of  Robinson  to  say  what  he  actually 
believes  about  the  peasant— Parnell  which  has  caused  most  of 
the  contention  among  critics.  Archer  says  emphatically:  "To 
the  end — such  is  the  author's  delicate  art,  we  do  not  know 
which  theory  is  the  true  one.  In  our  hearts,  however,  under 
the  glamour  of  the  scene,  we  have  not  the  least  doubt  that 
Lucius  is  the  real  Parnell."  On  the  other  hand  Massingham 
of  the  London  Nation  criticizes  the  play  for  its  end:  "In 
shrinking  from  the  full  assumption  on  which  the  drama  hangs, 
Lenihan's  identity  with  the  lost  leader,  its  author  lets  the 
true  problem — the  psychological  one--go  and  condemns  his  work 
to  unreality."  To  the  other  stock  criticism  of  the  play  that 
the  views  of  the  revived  Parnell  are  not  those  which  the  real 
man  held,  Lucius  himself  answers,  "Do  you  expect  me  to  speak 
as  I did  twenty-five  years  ago — to  forget  nothing,  to  learn 
nothing?  Do  you  expect  Ireland  to  change  and  me  to  stand 


still?" 


-109- 

The  play  is,  like  Robinson's  other  play3,  carefully 
planned  and  executed.  It  illustrates,  however,  the  great 

4 

weakness  of  Robinson  as  an  artist — his  predilection  for  politica 
rather  than  universal  human  drama.  He  is  a master  of  stage- 
craft. That  he  knows  how  to  do  personal  drama  of  a kind  which 
is  rare,  we  must  admit  when  we  remember  the  personal  phase  of 
all  his  dramas.  He  has  keen  and  unfaltering  sense  of  dramatic 
situation.  He  is  perfectly  able  to  fit  words  and  ideas  to 
distinctive  characters;  he  has  the  artist's  aloofness  from  life. 
His  only  great  dramatic  fault  i3  too  great  an  interest  in 
causes  which  necessarily  makes  his  work  transient  and  terri- 
torial in  their  appeal  . He  is  still  young,  and  if  he  learns 
to  write  "the  still  sad  music  of  humanity"  instead  of  the 
romance  of  political  issues,  he  will  be  a truly  great  dramatist. 

St.  John  Greer  Ervine  was  born  in  Belfast  in  1883, 
three  years  before  Robinson's  birth.  Like  most  young  writers 
who  have  not  yet  been  honored  with  a biography,  the  details 
of  his  early  life  are  shadowy.  But  even  if  he  was  not,  as 
Weygandt  declares,  the  son  of  a shipyards  workingman,  it  is 
certain  that  as  a lad  he  played  about  the  yards,  making  a 
child's  shrewd  observations  and  learning  to  know  the  spirit  of 
Belfast  working  classes  . He  early  began  to  read  omnivcrously 
and,  like  Robinson,  to  experiment  with  writing  while  yet  a 
mer9  child.  He  was  only  seventeen  when  he  went  to  London 


. 


. 


-110- 


to  take  up  journalism,  where  he  seems  to  have  gone  through  the 
prescribed  career  for  talented  young  Irishmen — even  to  having 
his  tongue  loosened  in  a debating  society  . Since  the  first 
years  of  his  apprenticeship,  he  has  been  a frequent  contributor 
to  The  Daily  News.  Manchester  Guardian,  and  the  London  Nat  ion 
and  other  publications,  besides  his  regular  work  for  the  Royal 
Exchange  Assurance. 

His  dramatic  career  began  in  1907  with  the  writing 
of  the  one-act  piece,  The  Magnanimous  Lover,  which,  however, 
was  not  presented  until  1913  after  Mixed  Marriage  had  taken 
ohe  Abbey  by  storm  and  established  the  author's  popularity  a3 
a playwright.  In  1913  Ervine  gave  up  his  position  with  the 
Royal  Exchange  Assurance  and  threw  his  lot  in  with  the  literary 
renaissance  oi  Ireland.  Since  then,  besides  serving  for  a 
year  as  manager  of  the  Abbey  and  acting  for  a time  as  dramatic 
critic  lor  The  Daily  Citizen,  he  has  written  two  slight  one- 
act  plays,  The  Critics  and  The  Orangeman:  two  long  plays  of 
worth,  Jane, ...Cl egg  and  John  Ferguson:  a volume  of  short  stories, 
II^fa-Ht,  OJ.clock  and  Other  Studies:  and  four  novels,  Mrs.  Martvn'a 
Man,  Alice  and_a  Family , Changing  Winds,  and  Foolish  Lovers  . 
Indeed,  he  seems  for  the  present  at  least  to  have  abandoned 
the  drama  for  the  novel,  and  with  James  Stephens  to  be  trying 
to  write  the  fiction  which  somehow  Ireland  has  never  produced. 
But  for  our  present  purpose,  it  is  only  with  Ervine  a3  a 
dramatist  that  we  are  concerned. 


-111- 


So  many  references  have  been  made  to  The  Magnanimous 
Lover  and  Mixed  Marriage  that  no  extended  discussion  of  them 
is  necessary  here.  The  former  play  is,  as  has  been  said,  one 
of  the  best  constructed  one-act  plays  in  the  language,  a no 
less  remarkable  "first  attempt"  than  The  Clancy  Name  from  the 
standpoint  of  craftsmanship.  The  theme  is  as  old  as  the  first 
injured  woman,  but  the  characterization  is  fresh  enough  to  pre- 
vent the  action  from  seeming  hackneyed.  In  all  his  later  work 
which  has  received  so  much  acclaim  from  the  press,  Ervine  has 
hardly  drawn  a better  character  than  Maggie  Cather,  a humble 
Magda  who  has  fought  her  bitter  way  to  respect  even  in  a com- 
munity pervaded  by  the  self-righteousness  of  Ulster.  In  her 
refusal  to  marry  the  coward  who  offers  marriage  in  order  "to 
make  a good  woman  of  her”  and  to  rid  himself  of  his  fear  of 
eternal  punishment,  Maggie  is  not  a stereotyped  mouthpiece  of 
Woman* 8 demands  as  she  would  have  been  in  the  hands  of  a clumsy 
amateur.  She  is  an  individual,  an  angry  scornful  woman  with 
Scotch-Irish  canniness  which  makes  her  reject  the  man  who  can 
say  callously  that  he  will  treat  his  child  "just  as  if  he  were 
a child  of  God  instead  of  sin." 

Mixed  Marriage,  the  play  which  won  Ervine *s  popular- 
ity, is  in  some  respects  the  best  of  all  his  work.  It  is  long 
enough  to  make  up  an  entire  evening's  program  and  as  Boyd  says, 
"It  compresses  within  four  acts  all  the  various  ramifications 
of.  that  religious  bigotry  which  has  served  politicians  more 


-113- 


usefully  than  it  has  served  Ulster."1  Structurally  the  play 
is  typical  of  all  of  Ervine's  work  in  its  firmness,  sense  of 
completeness,  tensity  of  situation,  and  mastery  of  a distinctive 
dialect.  There  are  almost  no  loose  threads  in  St.  John  Ervinefc 
dramas.  Mrs.  Rainey  is  in  many  ways  the  most  pleasing  creation 
in  the  realistic  drama  of  Ireland.  She  is  gentle  and  wise, 
tolerant  because  she  "belaves  in  lavin'  people  alone."  Through 

-out  the  play  she  expostulates  with  her  masterful  husband 

"Sure  ye'd  go  on  talkin'  a life  time  if  A was  to  let  ye;" 

"We're  get tin'  ould,  John;  it  dussen  become  the  ould  t'  be  head- 
strong and  onforgivin ' ."  But  in  the  end  when  the  obstinacy 
she  has  tried  so  hard  to  soften  brings  tragedy  upon  the  family, 
she  comforts  Rainey  through  her  tears,  "Aw,  my  poor  man,  my 
poor  man." 

In  this  connection  one  is  impelled  to  quote  a bit  of 
criticism  which  appeared  in  the  Dial  a few  years  ago:  "What 
distinguishes  Mr . Ervine  irom  most  :of  the  other  Irish  dramatists 
is  his  mastery  of  his  craft  and  his  firm  grasp  of  character. 
About  most  of  the  Irish  plays — Mr.  Colum's  for  instance--there 
is  a sort  of  amateurishness . Mr . Ervine  has  none  of  their 
aimless  talkativeness,  their  vagueness,  their  tendency  to  rest 
content  with  second  rate  workmanship.  With  him  every  stroke 
is  firm  and  clear  and  every  stroke  tells.  You  will  go  far  in 


1 • Contemporary  Drama  of  Ireland 1 p . 181 . 


1 

■ 

.. 


I II  I ■ m-  m 


-113- 


recent  drama  before  you  will  find  a better  drawn  character  than 
Mrs  . Rainey  or  her  husband. Few  readers  or  theatre-goers 
familiar  with  Ervine  will  question  these  words  . 

The  two  short  plays  which  followed  Mixed  Marriage 
appeared  in  1913  at  the  Abbey,  where  all  of  Ervine' s plays  ex- 
cept Jane  .Clegg  were  first  produced.  The  Critics  is  a witty 
little  satire  upon  the  Irish  press  representatives  who  had 
shrilly  attacked  The  Magnanimous  Lover  for  its  use  of  the  word 
"bastard.’1  The  scene  is  set  in  the  entrance  of  a Dublin 
theatre  where  a belated  press  critic  gathers  material  for  his 
article  upon  the  play  being  presented.  Considerable  fun  is 
obtained  from  the  comments  he  absorbs  upon  the  base  immorality 
of  the  play , which  turns  out  to  be  Hamlet . But  there  is  such 
obvious  exaggeration  of  even  a newspaper  critic's  stupidity 
(as  when  the  would-be  critics  decide  that  Shakespeare  must  be 
the  Gaelic  name  of  some  upstart  dramatist  recently  acquired  by 
the  Abbey)  that  one  wishes  that  Ervine  had  refrained  from  this 
attempt  to  follow  the  example  of  Byron  and  George  Bernard  Shaw. 
Naturally  the  play  has  never  had  any  stage  success,  and  even  if 
it  is  not  the  "intellectual  offence"  which  Boyd  charges,  it  is 
in  every  way  unworthy  of  Ervine,  except  in  the  point  of  struc- 
ture. Like  Robinson,  he  never  slips  there. 

Tho  Orangeman  is  the  same  vein  as  Mixed  Marriage  and 

1.  H.  E.  Woodbridge:  A Group  of  Irish  Plavs:  Dial.  Vol . 61, 
p . 463  . 


. 


• . 


. 


' 


. 

*T -I 


■ 


. 


-114- 


Purcell  's  The  Enthusiast,  a criticism  of  the  bigotry  which  re- 
fuses to  see  Ulster's  own  best  interests.  Here  again  the 
characterization  is  clear.  John  M'Clurg  is  a less  robust 
bigot  and  bully  than  John  Rainey , but  is  equally  headstrong. 
Here,  too,  Ervine  pins  his  faith  to  the  young  generation,  the 
best  of  whom  refuse  to  carry  the  "Ulster  drum"  or  any  other 
symbol  of  North— Irish  intolerance  . The  play  is  marred  by  a 
lack  of  the  humor  which  usually  appears  in  Ervine' s work,  and 
which  so  enlivens  Purcell's  little  comedy  on  the  same  theme  . 

Jane  Clegg,  the  next  play,  has  not  been  discussed  at 
any  length  because  it  is  really  outside  the  Irish  movement, 
dealing  as  it  does  with  London  life  and  character,  and  first 
presented  as  it  was  at  a London  theatre.  Choosing  an  English 
locale  for  the  play  must  have  been  an  experiment  with  Ervine, 
for  the  theme  is  one  so  inherent  in  human  nature  that  there 
seems  no  good  reason  why  Irish  characters  might  not  have  been 
used  as  well  as  Cockney.  But  as  Ervine  has  developed  it, 
it  is  English  in  spirit  as  well  as  in  the  superficial  aspects 
of  dialect  and  scene . It  is  chiefly  interesting  to  us  in  the 
present  study  for  its  illustration  of  Ervine's  preoccupation 
with  the  working  class  and  of  his  ability  to  put  in  motion  a 
set  of  characters  out  of  whose  natures  the  dramatic  struggle 
inevitably  grows.  The  intellectual  content  of  the  play  is 
important  but  is  never  emphasized  to  the  point  of  overshadowing 
the  emotional  conflict.  The  drama  progresses  by  the  process 


* 


' 


■ 


-115- 


of  boring  into  the  inmost  selves  of  Jane  and  Henry  Clegg. 

When  Jane,  with  the  full  extent  of  Henry's  faithlessness  before 
her,  says  quietly,  "You  are  an  absolute  rotter,"  Henry  replies: 
"I  don't  know.  I'm  not  a bad  chap  really.  I'm  just  weak. 

I'd  be  all  right  if  I had  a lot  of  money  and  a wife  that  wasn't 
better  than  I am — I ought  to  have  married  a woman  like  myself 
or  a bit  worse  -I  always  feel  mean  here.  Yes,  I am  mean. 

I know  that;  but  it  makes  me  meaner  than  I really  am  to  be 
living  with  you."  There  is  art  in  the  way  the  entire  psychol- 
ogical problem  of  moral  difference  in  marriage  is  handled  in 
J§Jie__Cleg£ . One  of  the  best  criticisms  of  the  play  is  Ludwig 
Lewishohn's:  "Jane _Clegg  is  not  a great  play,  even  though  we 
measur e it  in  terms  of  depth  and  intensity  rather  than  range. 
But  it  belongs  to  a great  kind . " 

John  Ferguson  first  appeared  in  1915  when  for  some 
reason  it  was  practically  a failure,  although  when  staged  a 
year  later  in  Jew  York  it  had  a high  degree  of  success  almost 
at  once.  It  is  longer  and  more  deeply  tragic  than  any  of  the 
other  plays' — more  affected  by  naturalism.  Naturalistic  in- 
fluence shows  in  the  helplessness  of  the  Ferguson  family  in  the 
chain  of  catastrophes  which  come  upon  them;  in  Jimmy  Caesar's 
inability  to  transcend  his  cowardly  nature  even  when  goaded  to 
fury  by  events;  in  the  irony  which  brings  the  money  a week  too 
late  to  save  the  trouble.  On  the  other  hand,  the  character 
of  the  protagonist,  his  sweetness,  and  his  resignation  which 


-116- 


is  a resignation  coming  from  strength  not  weakness,  these  things 
make  the  play  stand  out  in  beautiful  contrast  to  the  darkly 
naturalistic  plays  of  the  continental  school.  At  the  end  of 
the  play,  with  his  farm  taken  from  him,  his  daughter's  life 
ruined,  and  his  only  son  doomed  to  the  gallows,  John  Ferguson 
finas  comfort  in  his  religion.  The  emotional  up-fling  upon 
which  Aristotle  insisted  for  tragedy  is  felt  in  a play  which 
ends  with  the  beautiful  old  words,  "0  my  son  Absalom,  my  son, 
my  son  Absalom  1 Would  God  I had  died  for  them.  0 Absalom, 
my  son — my  son'."  It  is  not  necessary,  surely,  to  contrast 

the  emotional  effect  of  such  words  with  that  of  "The  sun the 

sun— give  me  the  sun,  mother,"  or  with  the  last  lines  of 
Strindberg's  Father . 

Except  for  the  remarks  of  Jimmy  Caesar  and  of  "Clutie" 
John,  the  neighborhood  vagrant  whose  presence  in  the  play  seems 
somewhat  of  an  artistic,  mis-step,  John  Ferguson  is  unrelieved 
by  the  humor  which  is  evident  in  most  of  Ervine's  other  liter- 
ary work.  And  to  a thoughtful  reader  Jimmy  is  essentially 
pathetic  because  he  realizes  so  keenly  his  lack  of  strength. 

The  sayings  of  the  half-wit  are  so  much  in  the  minor  key  that 
they  add  rather  than  detract  from  the  general  effect. 

E.  A.  Boyd,  Ervine's  most  savage  critic,  declares  that 
the  characterization  of  John  Ferguson  is  "crude",  "melodramatic," 

rt 

and  purely  a mental  conception  of  human  types";  that  Jimmy 

n 

Caesar  is  a monstrous  caricature,  who  utters  openly  all  the 


. 


. 


-117- 


cravsn  thoughts  of  the  meanest— spirit ed  creature  conceivable 
to  the  average  man";  that  John  Ferguson  himself  "lacks  real 
life"  Granting  that  Jimmy  is  exaggerated,  and  that  Ferguson 
may,  perhaps,  repeat  too  many  Scriptural  lines,  one  must  still 
object  to  such  sweeping  disapproval  as  Boyd's.  If  the  talk 
of  the  characters  seems  exaggerated,  it  is  at  least  fully  borne 
out  by  their  actions  . Hever  once  does  Jimmy  act  in  any  way 
inharmonious  with  his  craven  utterances j John  Ferguson  trans- 
cends his  momentary  human  weakness  after  Andrew's  confession 
and  behaves  according  to  the  exalted  character  and  the  simple 
faith  of  a man  who  has  grounded  his  life  on  the  Bible. 

Before  leaving  Ervine's  work  as  a playwright  some 
attention  must  be  given  to  the  caustic  criticism  he  has  met  at 
the  hands  oi  the  writer  of  Contemporary  Drama  in  Ireland. 

Boyd  certainly  cannot  be  said  to  show  a great  deal  of  love  for 
any  of  the  young  playwrights,  with  the  exceptions  of  Colum  and 
Mayne,  whose  work  is  structurally  among  the  weakest  in  the 
entire  group  of  realists.  But  upon  Ervine  he  empties  the  full 
violence  of  his  wrath.  Charging  the  Belfast  playwright  with 
total  lack  of  the  Irish  spirit  which  is  to  him  the  touchstone 
of  excellence  of  Irish  drama,  he  declares:  "Whatever  their  re- 
spective merits  and  demerits,  all  the  writers  heretofore  men- 
tioned have  endeavored,  with  varying  success,  it  is  true,  to 


1 • Contemporary  Drama  of  Ireland,  p.  187. 


' 


-118- 


drainatize  tho3Q  elements  of  our  civilization  which  are  funda- 
mentally and  specifically  Irish.  Some  have  felt  the  poetry 
others  the  tragedy,  some  have  seen  only  the  humor,  others  the 
super! icial  drama  o!  Ireland — hut  with  negligible  exceptions 
none  have  written  in  a mood  indifferent  or  alien,  to  the  spirit 
of  the  race  . St  . John  Ervine  must  be  counted  amongst  those 
exceptions.  He  has  not  divined  any  vital  situation  arising 
out  of  the  character  of  the  Irish  people  and  the  composition 
of  Irish  society  . His  presentation  of  the  political  conflict 
in  Ulster,  a relatively  superficial  and  transitory  condition, 
is  the  only  instance  where  he  has  given  dramatic  expression  to 

a genuine  Irish  problem In  fine  this  dramatist  is  at 

bottom  a journalist,  with  an  eye  for  the  external  peculiarities 
of  Irish  life  . 1,1 

Even  if  this  attack  were  in  every  way  justified  by 
the  facts,  we  could  not  allow  the  fault  indicated  to  be  the 
serious  thing  which  Boyd  believes  it.  The  spirit  of  it  would 
condemn  the  work  of  Ibsen  himself,  for  few  of  his  best  dramas 
try  to  dramatize  the  elements  of  civilizations  which  are 
"fundamentally  and  specifically "Norwegian . But  that  doss 

not  make  of  him  a ” journalist . ” Modern  literary  art  shows  a 
growing  tendency  to  portray  the  universal  of  human  nature  under 


1 . Contemporary  Drama  of  Ireland,  p . 194 . 


' 


. 


-119- 


the  "external  peculiarities"  of  region  and  dialect.  A real- 
ization oi  this  fact  and  a sense  of  the  harm  which  ha3  been 
done  in  Ireland  by  isolating  her  from  the  common  civilization 
of  other  countries  leads  Joyce  to  make  one  of  his  characters 
say  in  The  Exile 8 j "If  Ireland  is  to  become  a new  Ireland , 
she  must  first  become  Europeanized."  Ervine  is  thoroughly 
in  tune  with  the  artistic  trend  of  his  age  when  he  attempts 
to  show  universal  nature  in  the  Irish  working  people  of  whom 
he  writes.  It  is  not  necessary  that  art  shall  be  the  expres- 
sion of  a "profound  or  essential  phase  of  national  life  and 
being . " 


Boyd’s  last  statement  that  Mixed  Marriage  and  The 
iLranfleman  are  "presentation  of  the  political  conflict"  is  not 
critically  just.  Political  subjects  are  "relatively  super- 
ficial and  transitory",  it  is  true,  and  are  never  material  for 
the  best  art.  But  in  the  case  of  these  plays  the  real  theme 
is  bigoted  intolerance  and  obstinacy.  Surely  those  are  not 
superficial  and  transitory  phases  of  human  nature.  Ervine' s 
work  has  its  blemishes  and  imperfections,  but  not  those  as- 
cribed to  it  by  Boyd.  If  only  the  poetry  of  Yeats's  kings  and 
the  naivete  of  Synge's  peasants  are  Irish,  Boyd  is  perhaps 
right.  But  if  humor  and  homely  imaginativeness,  hot  tempers 
and  stiff  wills  are  Irish,  none  of  Ervine 's  Ulster  people  can  be 
said  to  lack  Celtic  flavor.  If  he  has  definitely  abandoned 
the  drama  for  the  novel,  contemporary  dramatic  art  has  lost  a 
promising  writer. 


' 


. 


. 


-120- 


CHAPTER  VI. 

CONCLUSION . 

In  the  course  of  this  study  we  have  traced  the  veering 
of  contemporary  Irish  drama  away  from  the  imaginative  drama 
inaugurated  by  Yeats  and  perfected  by  Synge;  the  influence  of 
the  "drama  of  ideas"  upon  the  men  who  began  writing  just  when 
Synge  was  leaving  off ; the  development  of  a new  type  of  peasant 
who  is  neither  so  clod-like  and  brutal  as  that  of  the  natural- 
istic writer  of  the  continent  nor  so  fanciful  and  extravagant 
as  that  of  the  earlier  Irish  playwrights;  the  building  up  of 
a conception  of  Irish  life  which  is  not  strictly  dependent  upon 
province  boundaries;  and  finally,  in  very  brief  fashion  em- 
phasis has  been  laid  upon  the  two  writers  whose  work  seems  most 
significant  and  most  promising  of  better  things  to  come.  A 
few  words  must  suffice  to  round  out  this  discussion  of  the 
realistic  new  Irish  drama. 

It  is  true  that  none  of  the  Irish  playwrights  of 
to-day  have  exhibited  the  imaginative  wealth  and  artistic  skill 
oi  great  dramatists,  although  at  least  two  of  the  group  have 
written  plays  which  if  not  among  the  very  best  of  modern  dramas 
are  immeasurably  superior  to  the  average  stage  plays.  Ama- 
teurish and  tainted  with  melodrama  though  the  new  Irish  drama 
often  is,  it  never  descends  to  the  level  of  the  trash  which  so 
often  occupies  the  English  and  American  stage.  It  is  marked 


' 


■ 

' 


. 


' 


, 


. 


-121- 


by  a simplicity  and  absence  of  theatricality  which  goes  back 
to  the  Irish  "genius  for  common  life”.  It  attempts  a dig- 
nified, homespun  realism  which  shall  show  Irish  life  as.it  and 
every  other  rural  lile  is.  It  embodies  a candid  criticism 
of  national  life  which  might  play  to  empty  seats  in  America 
if  made  upon  American  life.  It  is  entirely  clean  and  whole- 
some in  spirit — there  is  not  one  suggestive  speech  in  the  entire 
list  of  plays  under  discussion. 

The  criticism  of  Lloyd  Morris  seems  entirely  just  and 
apt.  " ihe  younger  school  refuses  to  find  consolation  and  refuge 
either  in  its  dreams  or  in  an  heroic  past.  They  are  concerned 
with  the  problems  of  to-day  in  an  effort  to  influence  the  life 
of  tomorrow.  They  produce  social  criticism  in  order  to  en- 
force the  changes  which  they  desire  Ireland  to  undergo;  if  they 
a.re  extreme  in  their  satire  and  pessimistic  in  their  tragic 
conception  of  life,  it  is  because  propaganda  must  necessarily 
enforce  its  point  by  exaggerating  and  emphasizing  conditions. 
Their  propaganda,  however,  is  not  one  of  art,  but  of  actual 
experience.  What  these  new  playwrights  have  done  is  to  turn 
irom  art  to  life,  and  by  doing  so  they  have  laid  the  foundations 
of  their  art  upon  a firmer  soil.”1 

In  the  trying  years  of  the  war  dramatic  activity  in 
Ireland,  like  every  artistic  activity  in  every  land,  came  almost 


1 • Celtic  Dawn,  p . 170 . 


-123 


to  a standstill.  For  a time  the  Abbey  Theatre  was  closed  and 
the  old  company  of  Irish  actors  was  dissipated.  From  1915  to 
1920  almost  no  plays  of  distinction  were  written  or  produced 
in  troubled  Ireland.  But  since  Lennox  Robinson  has  turned 
his  energies  toward  restoring  the  national  theatre  to  its  old 
power,  there  is  every  reason  to  hope  that  play-writing  and 
play-acting  will  come  back  into  their  own  in  Ireland. 


-124- 

BIBLIOGR/ PHY 

I.  Contemporary  Irish  Dramatists. 

Boyle,  William. 

The  Building  Fund.  Dublin,  1905 
The  Eloquent  Demusey.  Dublin,  1907. 

The  Mineral  Workers.  Dublin,  1907. 

Family  Failing.  Dublin,  1913. 

Campbell,  Joseph. 

-The  Little  Cowherd  of  Slain  ,e.  In  Uladh. 
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Judgment.  Dublin,  1S12. 

Colum,  Pa.draic . 

"he  Land.  Dublin,  1905. 

Th§  Fiddler * s House.  Dublin,  1907. 

Thomas  Muskerrv.  Dublin,  1910. 

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Corkery,  Daniel. 

Clan  0 1 Falvey 

The  King  and  the  Hermit 

The  Yell ow  Bittern 

A11  in  Three  Plays.  Hew  York,  1916. 

Dunsany,  Lord. 

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^■ing  Argimenes  and  the  Unknown  Warrior. 

The  Golden  Do om. 

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All  in  Five  Plays.  London,  1914. 


-• 


. 

. 


-125- 


The  Tents  of  the  Arabs.  In  ^he  Smart  Set. 
March,  1915. 

A Night  at  an  Inn.  Dublin,  1916. 

Ervine,  St.  .John  G. 

Mixed  Marriage.  Dublin,  1911. 

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AH  in  Four  Plays.  Dublin,  1914 
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J Ferguson.  Dublin, 1915 
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The  Magic  Glasses. 

The  Moonlighter. 

The  Dandy  Dolls . 

All  in  Five  Plays.  Dublin,  1914. 

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All  in  Seven  Short  Plays. 


. 


. 


■ 


■ 


-126- 


Kincora. 

The  White  Cockade. 

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The  Deliverer. 

Grania. 

All  in  Irish  Folic-History  Plays.  London,  1912. 
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W.B.Yeats).  New  York,  1908. 

The  Full  Moon. 

McDonough1 s Wife . 

The  Bogie  Man 
Darner1  s C-old. 

All  in  New  Comedies . New  York,  1913 

MacDonagh,  Thomas. 

When  the  Dawn  is  come.  Dublin,  1908. 

Mayne,  Rutherford. 

The  Turn  of  the  Road.  Dublin,  1907. 

The  Drone.  Dublin,  1909. 

The  Troth.  Dublin,  1909. 

Red  Turf 

“ ■‘■1  Drone  and  other  Plays . Boston,  191 

Murray,  T.  C. 

Birthright.  Dublin,  1911. 

Maurice  Harte.  Dublin,  1912. 

O’Kelly,  Seumas. 

The  Matchmakers.  Dublin,  1911 


n 


. 


. 


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The  Shuiler ' s Child,  Dublin,  1909. 

The  Bribe . Dublin,  1914. 

Pearse,  Padraic. 

The  Singer. 

The  King. 

The  Master. 

Iosagan. 

In  Collected  Works.  New  York,  1917. 

Purcell,  Lewis. 

The  Enthusiast.  In  Uladh.  May,  1907. 

The  Pagan.  Dublin,  1907. 

Robinson,  Lennox. 

The  Clancy  Name.  in  Two  Plays.  Dublin,  1911. 
The  Cross  Roads.  Dublin,  1911. 

Harvest.  In  Two  Plays. 

Patriots.  Dublin,  1912. 

The  Dreamers . Dublin,  1915. 

The  Lost  Leader.  London,1917. 

The  White  headed  Boy.  Hew  York,  1921 
Synge,  John  M. 

In  the  Shadow  of  the  Glen.  London,  1905. 

Riders  to  the  Sea.  London,  1905. 

The  Well  _of  the  Saints.  Dublin,  London,  1905. 
The  Playboy  of  the  Western  World.  Dublin,  1907. 
The  Tinker’s  Wedding.  Dublin,  1907. 

Deirdre  of  the  Sorrows.  Dublin,  1907. 

AH  in  Collected  Works.  Dublin,  1910. 


!b 


. 


. 

■ 


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Yeats,  W.  B. 

The  Land  of  Heart 1 s £esire.  L0ndon,  1894. 

The  Countess  Cathleen.  London,  2892. 

Diarmuid  and  Granla. 

Cathleen  ni  Houlihan.  London,  1902. 

The  Pot  of  Broth.  London,  1904. 

The  Hour  Glass.  London,  1903. 

The  King* s Threshold.  London,  1904. 

The  Shadowy  Waters.  London,  1900. 

On  Baile' s Strand.  New  York,  1903. 

Where  there  is  Nothing.  London,  1903. 

Deirdre.  London,  1907. 

The  Golden  Helmet.  New  York,  1908. 

All  in  Collected  Works  in  Verse  and  Prose . 
Stratford-on-Avon,  1908. 

At  the  Hawk*  s Well. 

The  Only  Jealousy  of  Bmer . 

The  Dreaming  of  the  Bones. 

Calvary. 


All  in  E our  Plays  f or  Dancers . 


New  York,  192 U 


. 


..  i 


-129- 


II.  Books  of  Reference. 

Andrews,  Charlton.  The  Drama  of  To-dav.  Philadelphia,  1913. 
Bicxley,  Francis.  J.M.  Synge  and  the  Irish  Dramatists . 

London  and  Boston,  1912. 

Bourgeois,  Maurice.  John  Millington  Synge  and  the  Irish 
Theatre.  London,  1913. 

Boyd,  E.  A.  Contemporary  Drama  of  Ireland.  Boston,  1917. 

Ireland 1 s Literary  Renaissance.  New  York,  1916. 
Brown,  Stephen  J;  mes.  A.  Guide  t o Books  on  Ireland;  Part  I. 
Dublin,  1912. 

chandler,  Frank  IV.  Aspects  of  Modern  Drama.  New  York,  1914. 
Clark,  B.  H.  British  and  American  Drama  of  To-day . 

New  York,  1914. 

The  Continental  Drama  of  To-day . New  York,  1914. 
Gwynne,  Stephen.  To-day  and  To-morrow  in  Ireland.  Dublin,  19  jj 
Hackett,  Francis.  Ireland.  New  York,  1919. 

Henderson,  Archibald.  The  Changing  Drama.  New  York,  1915. 
Howe,  P.P.  J.M.  Synge:  A Critical  Study.  London,  1912. 

Hull,  Eleanor.  A Text  Book  of  Irish  Literature.  Dublin,  1906 
Jameson,  Storm.  Modern  Drama  in  Europe . New  York,  1920 

Lewisohn,  Ludwig.  The  Modern  Drama.  New  York,  1915. 

Lynd,  Pobert.  Ireland  a Nation.  New  York,  1920. 

Masefield,  John.  John  M.  Synge : A Few  Personal  Recollections. 
Dundrum  and  New  York,  1905. 

MacDonagh,  Thomas.  Literature  in  Ireland.  London,  1916. 


-130- 


Mo  nahan,  Micheal.  Nova  Hibernia.  New  York,  1914. 

Morris,  Lloyd;R.  The  Celtic  Dawn.  New  York,  1917. 

Moore,  George.  Hail  and  F ar ewe 11 : 3 vols.  London  end 
New  York,  1911-1914. 

Pendergast,  M.H.  The  Peasant  in  Modern  British  Drama. 

Master’s  Thesis  at  the  University  of  Illinois, 
1920. 

Reid,  Forrest.  WJ3.  Yeats:  A Critical  Study.  New  York,  1911. 
Weygandt,  Cornelius.  Irish  Plays  and  Playwrights.  Boston, 
1913. 

Yeats,  W.B.  The  Irish  Dramatic  Movement.  In  Collected 
Forks,  Vol. IV.  Stratf ord-on-j^von,  1908. 

Zola,  E.  The  Experimental  Novel.  Chapters  on  Naturalism 
on  the  Stage,  ^aris,  1876. 

III.  Periodicals. 

/rcher,  Filliam.  Criticism  of  The  White-headed  Boy.  Review, 
December,  1915. 

Birmingham,  George.  The  Literary  Movement  in  Ireland. 

Fortnightly  Review.  December,  1907. 

Collier’ s A Review  of  Mixed  Marriage.  January  15,  1921. 

Vol.  67.  p.  19. 

Colum,  Padraic.  The  Irish  Literary  Movement.  Forum,  June, 
1914;  Vol.  53. 

Current  Literature.  Irish  Home  Rule  in  the  Drama.  January, 


1911;  Vol.  70.  pp.  940-945. 


-131- 


Current  Opinion.  Excerpts  from  The  Lost  Leader.  January. 
1920;  Vol.  68  pp.  47-53. 

The  Versatile  Genius  of  St.  John  Ervine. 

June,  1915;  Vol.  58.  pp.  421-7. 

Ervine,  St.  John  G.  The  Irish  dramatist  and  the  Irish  People. 
Forum,  June,  1914;  Vol.  51.  pp.  940-45. 

“ Confessions  of  a Playwright  on  Play-making. 

Current  Opinion,  February,  1921;  Vol. 70.  pp.  210-1 
Hackett,  Francis.  Review  of  The  White -headed  Boy.  New  Republi 
October  5,  1921;  Vol.  28.  p.  161. 

Hoare,  3.  I reland  * s Nat i onal  Drama , North  American  Review. 

October,  1911;  Vol.  194.  pp.  566-75. 

Myirig  Age.  Irish  Theatre.  January  11,  1919;  Vol. 300  . 
pp.  119-21 

Matthews,  Brander.  Irish  Plays  and  Playwrights.  Scribner*  s . 

January, 1917;  Vol.  61.  pp.  85-90. 

MacCarthy,  Pesmond.  Rev  ew  of  The  Lost  Leader.  Living  Age. 
Vol.  302.  pp.  399-401. 

Morris,  Lloyd  R.  An  Ulster  Realist . (Ervine)  Outlook.  June 
23,  1920;  Vol.  125.  pp.  388-9. 

Me  Quilland,  H.  St.  J ohn  Ervine  and  his  Work.  Living  Age, 
April  3,  1920;  Vol.  125.  pp.  45-50. 

The  Nation.  Review  of  J ane  £legg.  March  20,  1920;  Vol.  110. 
pp.  376-377. 

The  New  Statesman.  On  the  Edge.  June  15,  1921.  Vol.  16. 


pp.  447-448. 


-132- 


Thje  Qutlool-c.  The  Irish  Play  of  To-day . November  4,  1911. 

V ol . 99.  pp.  561-3. 

The  ileviev/.  Review  of  The  Lost  Leader.  July  26,  1919; 

Vol.  I.  pp.  238-9. 

Ruhl,  A.  New  Stage  Irishmen.  Collier1 s.  March  15,  1913. 

Vol.  50.  p.25. 

Smith,  Helen  Travers.  The  Art  of  Lennox  Robinson.  Drama. 

April  19,  1921;  Vol  11.  pp.  238-3. 

Tennyson,  Charles.  Irish  Plays  and  Playwrights . (Quarterly 
Review,  July,  1911;  Vol.  213.  pp.  219-43. 
The  Rise  of  the  Irish  Theatre.  Con- 
temporary Literature.  August,  1911.  Vol. 100. 
Touchstone . The  Writer  of  the  Hour  in  Ireland.  October,  1919; 
Vol.  6.  pp.  42-46. 

Walbrook,  H.M.  Irish  dramatists  and  Their  Countrymen. 

giving  Age,  Vol.  279.  pp.  189-93. 

Woodbridge,  H.E-  A Group  of  Irish  Plays.  Dial.  November, 30, 
1916;  Vol.  61.  pp.  462-3. 

Yeats,  W.b.  Irish  Literature.  Touchstone.  November,  1920; 
Vol.  8.  pp.  81-5. 


UNIVER9ITY  OF  ILLINOIS-URBANA 


